The most important skill for a senior engineer (or, really, any job in a large organization) is... Political skills.
What projects / technologies / customers / designs are considered important? Who are the potential allies? Who are potential obstacles? What are their motivations? What is the best plan of action the benefits the group? How to get everyone's alignment?
Never hire anyone who's bad at communication. The bottleneck in a large organization is always politics. Whether you can attract skillful engineers to begin with is also a question of communications and politics.
What projects / technologies / customers / designs are considered important? Who are the potential allies? Who are potential obstacles? What are their motivations? What is the best plan of action the benefits the group? How to get everyone's alignment?
Never hire anyone who's bad at communication. The bottleneck in a large organization is always politics. Whether you can attract skillful engineers to begin with is also a question of communications and politics.