When I joined my current company, I was the only software engineer working on embedded firmware (with plenty of help from folk with non-software backgrounds.) I had about a year and a half of frantic coding to set the foundation in place, and now almost 5 years in we have an embedded team of over a dozen people. I'm not particularly interested in management, and there has been no pressure for me to go that route, so I've successfully remained a leaf in the org chart. My current manager is the third person we hired to the embedded team, just a year or two out of school at the time, and he's doing an awesome job. I feel like I probably have a lot of political power within the organization, but I can't really say because I never need to use it. I'm lucky enough to generally like everyone I work with.

New folk in other parts of the company ask me what I do, and the best way I can describe it these days is meta-engineering. Rather than take long term ownership of any part of the system, I take temporary ownership of the scary parts that need the most attention, refactor them until they're as boring as I can using a suitably large sledgehammer, and then release them back into the wild to (hopefully never) be someone else's problem again. When I'm not doing that, entire weeks go by just reviewing coworkers' PRs, writing architecture documents, and interviewing job candidates. I'm widely known for bluntly (but hopefully respectfully) giving my opinion when weighing in on technical subjects I think I know about, and it seems to be well received. Pretty much all direct and indirect feedback I get is to keep doing that more. Many coworkers even send me their designs and PRs with an explicit request to mercilessly tear it apart.

I've been addicted to watching episodes of "Kitchen Nightmares" this past month, and I just realized that it's sorta like what I do at work, but with less swearing and the undercooked chicken is lack of regression test coverage. Also, the restaurant doors haven't closed up 6 months later yet!