Where does SDET ‘non-testing’ development efforts get tracked?

TL;DR A SDET who is developing infrastructure to allow for automation testing of an application, where does that work get tracked? On the dev board? Does it get pointed like any other development ticket?

Context: I'm a Quality Engineer who has been hired to a company which team is working on some back-end micro-services. There is no QE process other than devs unit testing their work. I was hired to put in proper QE principles as well as develop automation testing, also no other QA members other than me. Decided to go with Spec-flow, just because the another similar team is using that and it could add value to this project. I'm in the process of building a separate application that will mock the data of the external calls that our micro-services are integrating. Using Kafka as the distribution service, I'll then used that stored data and feed that into whichever system under test. So not necessarily work that is developing test cases, but the infrastructure that will allow me to develop these develop test cases. I have a Epic of stories in the backlog of the infrastructure work. In refinement however, I tried to advocate for pulling some work in the spring but my the engineering manager was hesitant to pull them in and point the stories because he didn't want to 'change the purpose of the velocity'. His idea is that all points of a story should reflect effort that is going to make the application tangibly "better" from a users stand point, so like bug fixes and adding features. (It would be a good time to note here. That some of the Kafka infrastructure set-up i'll need just a little bit of assistance from the developers. There services are also implementing Kafka so it shouldn't be too much of a task.) His solution is to have a 'Dev/QA support' ticket, with only about 2 or 3 points and those points will be reserved for helping me. But the problem I have with that is my work is not being tracked. Ideally I would think the tickets that where refined in the back log would be brung in the sprint, pointed, and I work on them as if I was a developer. (Since I am doing sort of development work, but just developing infrastructure that'll allow me to write automation tests). I thought about getting upper management to get me a Kanban board for tracking my work, but I talked to other QA and they said that might not be the best idea. They say it would separate the QA and dev team, and make me feel like a 'contractor' to my own team. What is generally the best practice? Should I get a Kanban board or advocate for my stories to be on the dev board. If they are on the dev board how should they be pointed?