As you increase in seniority, you’ll take on bigger projects, projects that can’t succeed without collaboration, communication, and alignment; your brilliant solutions are just going to cause you frustration if you can’t convince the other people on the team that yours is the right path to take. And whether you want to or not, you’ll be a role model: other engineers will look to those with the big job titles to understand how to behave. So, no: you can’t avoid being a leader.
