A lot of engineers ask me how they can find impactful projects in their organization to grow into a Staff+ engineer role. Sometimes they feel that their manager is unable to find the right opportunities for them, or they feel constrained by the scope of the team they're currently working on. Sometimes they actually feel that the best projects are already taken up by others. I want to address this problem head-on and just share some secrets for finding and solving meaningful problems in an engineering organization.

Although the session is targeted at senior-level engineers, I think that what I'm going to share applies to engineers at any stage of their careers. Recognizing patterns and problems, generalizing them, and building solutions for the broader organization are all invaluable skills to grow your career at any stage. Although I will be using real-world technical examples for this, my advice even applies to job functions beyond engineering.

I would like to have them walk away feeling confident about a few things. First, you do not need to wait for someone to assign you a big project to grow your career. I think meaningful, impactful problems are waiting to be solved all around you as long as you're willing to keep a keen eye out for them. Second, engineers complain about systems and processes all the time, and these are the tedious, unattractive problems that could be your biggest opportunities to solve hard technical issues with massive impact on your organization. Third, beyond your technical skills, you must embrace the soft skills needed to solve such problems at scale, even if they make you uncomfortable. So understanding the business, aligning with non-engineering leaders, presenting to executives, written communication, and public speaking: these are all examples of skills that all engineers must practice all the time.