Ask HN: How to deal with a clique of experienced engineers?

In the startup I work at there are few software engineers who are experienced and have been working together at this company for quite some time. It's usually this group of people who are involved in taking important decisions, work on interesting and more technical problems, and determine what the team should work on. The thing is there are other experienced people in the team, but still those engineers and other less experienced engineers are "left out". As a result these other engineers work on less interesting stuff (operational work, bug fixing, minor features, etc.) and they feel like they are not part of the team as they don't have much effect on the direction the team is going. In the past several months this has led to a few engineers leaving the company. Any advice about how to deal with this sort of situation as an engineer?