To do this well, you need to build a diverse network across the organization. Building and nurturing relationships across functional areas is critical to IC success, giving you the context to spot important issues and the influence to mobilize resources to solve them.
Finally, you must be an effective communicator, able to translate between technical and business audiences. Leaders need you to contextualize system design choices in terms of business outcomes and tradeoffs. And engineers need you to provide clear problem statements and solution sketches.
It’s a unique blend of skills, but if you can cultivate this combination of technical depth, organizational acumen, and business-minded communication, CIs can generate powerful innovations. And you can do it while preserving the practical problem-solving skills that probably drew you to engineering in the first place.
Fostering IC career paths
As AI/ML fields evolve, there is a growing need for senior CIs who can provide technical leadership. Many organizations realize they need people who can combine deep expertise and strategic thinking to ensure these technologies are applied effectively.
However, many companies are still figuring out how to empower and support IC career paths. I am fortunate that Capital One has invested heavily in creating a strong community of distinguished engineers. We have put in place mentoring, training and knowledge sharing structures to help senior ICs develop and drive innovation.
ICs have more freedom than most to craft their own job description based on their own preferences and skills. Some CIs may choose to focus on hands-on coding, tackling deeply complex problems within an organization. Others may take a more holistic approach, looking at how teams intersect and continually collaborating across different areas to move projects forward. Regardless, an IC must be able to see the organization from a broad perspective and know how to spot the right places to focus their attention.
Effective ICs also need the space and resources to stay at the forefront of their field. In a field like AI/ML that evolves so quickly, continuous learning and exploration is essential. It’s not a nice feature, but an essential part of the job, and since your time as an individual doesn’t scale, it requires dedication to time management.
Glimpse the future
The role of an IC engineering leader is to combine deep technical expertise with a strategic mindset. This is a key ingredient to the type of transformational change driven by AI, but realizing this potential will require changing the way many organizations think about leadership.
I’m excited to see more engineers pursuing an IC path and bringing their unique combination of skills to bear on AI/ML’s toughest challenges. With the right organizational support, I believe a new generation of CI leaders will emerge and help shape the future of the field. This is the opportunity before us, and I look forward to leading by taking action.
This content was produced by Capital One. It was not written by the MIT Technology Review editorial team.
