Leading Without the Title: How Engineers Demonstrate Technical and People Leadership through Action

In modern engineering environments, leadership isn’t always about managing people—it’s about owning problems, enabling teams, and amplifying impact. The following examples come from a real-world context and show how a hands-on engineer demonstrates both people and technical leadership, even outside formal leadership roles or full-time positions.

This is not just about what was done—it’s about how it was done, who benefited, and how those actions scale.

Technical Leadership: Driving Change Through Expertise and Execution

1. Taking Initiative on Technical Upgrades

• Updated the Prometheus Operator after three years of stagnation.
• Performed minor-version Kubernetes upgrades in production with zero downtime.
• Migrated from the Prometheus Adapter to Metrics Server and transitioned Tier 1 load balancers without incident.

Impact: These aren’t routine updates—they’re high-stakes improvements that required technical depth, preparation, and coordination. Taking ownership of this work shows confidence, precision, and care for stability and reliability.

2. Prototyping Future-Ready Solutions

• Conducted PoCs for KEDA and Karpenter to enhance autoscaling strategies.
• Deployed KEDA in a preview environment using real CI/CD tooling and Helm charts.
• Built an idea bank to capture future architectural improvements.

Impact: Technical leaders look ahead. They don’t just react—they explore, test, and document emerging options. This behavior improves the system over time and de-risks change for the rest of the team.

3. Raising the Bar for Technical Hygiene

• Introduced and streamlined Dependabot setups across multiple services.
• Implemented code style and linting rules in an older Lua-based project.
• Performed dependency updates, base image updates, and manual production rollout checks for mission-critical services.

Impact: Small, consistent improvements form the foundation for sustainable velocity. Leading these efforts demonstrates ownership of quality, even in less glamorous areas of the stack.

People Leadership: Influence Without Authority

4. Proactive Collaboration Across Teams

• Helped other teams with VPC configurations, routing infrastructure, and API onboarding.
• Asked for 1:1s with senior colleagues to foster alignment and gain feedback.
• Actively followed up on complicated team topics and sought resolution.

Impact: Leadership means removing friction for others. Whether helping peers, clarifying architecture, or ensuring smooth handovers, these examples show emotional intelligence in action.

5. Mentorship via Enablement and Documentation

• Wrote exhaustive documentation on:

  • Rate-limiting setup
  • KEDA deployment using SQS queue metrics
  • Coexistence of Metrics Server and Prometheus Adapter

• Created rollout playbooks for services and infrastructure upgrades.

Impact: When you teach others through writing, you multiply your value. These guides and plans reduce tribal knowledge and increase operational confidence across teams.

6. Encouraging Culture and Process Discipline

• Created a new Miro retrospective board template for the team.
• Kept an eye on team protocols and working agreements.
• Stepped up to clarify or redirect external support questions.

Impact: These contributions may seem “soft”, but they’re essential for keeping a team aligned and high-functioning. Culture maintenance is people leadership in disguise.

Building and Sharing Expertise

• Passed the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam (94%).
• Contributed to multiple open-source projects, including the Prometheus Operator and Bytecode Alliance (WASM).
• Committed to continuous learning via advanced courses on Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and IAM.

Impact: Leadership is also about credibility. When you deepen your expertise and contribute to shared knowledge, others naturally look to you for guidance.

A Strategy for Engineers to Demonstrate Leadership

Based on these examples, here’s a repeatable strategy you can apply to grow your own influence:

1. Own the Unowned. Step up to fix neglected services, broken pipelines, or invisible pain points. Don’t wait to be asked.
2. Scale Yourself Through Writing. Good documentation is high-leverage work. If you solve something hard, write it down for the next person.
3. Make Systems—and People—Better. Improve infrastructure, but also uplift your team. Pair, mentor, and support your peers across teams.
4. Think Beyond the Sprint. Explore PoCs, evaluate tools, and document strategic directions. Future-proofing is leadership.
5. Connect Across Boundaries. Look beyond your team. Help others. Share knowledge. Smooth integration points. Be a connector.
6. Keep Growing and Sharing. Stay sharp. Invest in learning. Pass certifications. Contribute to open source. Share back internally.

Personal Reflection: Growing into Strategic Leadership

Looking at my work so far, I feel confident in the way I’ve contributed through ownership, collaboration, and enabling others technically. I’ve taken on complex upgrades, supported multiple teams, and shared knowledge in ways that help the organization move faster. That said, one area I see room to grow in is strategic leadership—going beyond solving technical problems to shaping the direction of systems and influencing larger architectural or product decisions. I’d like to get more involved in early discovery phases, collaborate more closely with product and design on long-term planning, and help define the technical vision that guides multiple teams.

A good starting point could be:

• Writing a proposal for a long-term technical improvement that ties into platform or product goals.
• Taking a more active role in architecture reviews or cross-team discussions.
• Co-leading a small cross-team initiative from discovery through delivery to practice leading alignment efforts.
• Translating technical insights into product or operational impact more often, especially in planning contexts.
• Participating in or initiating early planning conversations for roadmap items—ideally with both engineering and product stakeholders.

This feels like a natural next step in evolving from a reliable contributor to someone who also helps shape where we’re going next.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need a formal title to lead. Leadership is visible in how you take initiative, support others, and leave systems and teams better than you found them. The work highlighted here shows strong evidence of technical ownership, operational excellence, and people enablement—hallmarks of a well-rounded, hands-on leader.

That said, a valuable next frontier is strategic and visionary leadership: shaping the “why” and “where next” in addition to the “how”. This involves influencing roadmaps, aligning architecture across teams, and tying engineering work to broader business outcomes. Developing in this space—by proposing long-term initiatives, co-leading multi-team efforts, or actively shaping technical direction with PMs—can deepen your impact and elevate your influence across the organization.

Start where you are: own what others avoid, document what others forget, and connect where others silo. Leadership isn’t a role—it’s a set of consistent behaviors. Build trust through action, and opportunities to lead at a higher level will follow.