just letting your engineers decide how to code a solution is not what is meant by empowerment. Of course, they need to decide how to implement the solution. Letting your engineers determine the architecture is also not what is meant by empowerment. Of course, they also need to be able to decide the architecture. Empowerment of an engineer means that you provide the engineers with the problem to solve and the strategic context, and they are able to leverage technology to figure out the best solution to the problem.
