I work on AI based apps and I interview folks regularly. For mid-level to senior positions in big tech, you are expected to reason and solve ambiguous and complex problems. Don't fuss too much about AI in your system designs, unless it is specific for an app or a feature that uses AI.

There isn't a lot of production-ready-knowledge available in the big tech industry when it comes to AI. Most of the smaller apps today don't even have their own AI - they talk to either chat-gpt or some other providers through a contract. Apply general design principles to your solutions and show your strength in breaking down complex/ambiguous problems to smaller digestible ones. 

Software Engineer @ Amazon

Bala Ramdoss

You are not alone. I am a SDE3 and I rarely get focussed things done when I am at the office. My role requires allocating time on various initiatives and does give me some freedom to manage my own time. I schedule (and request other meeting organizers) meetings to fit into my "office work hours" and it has been working really well. When you think about others, they probably feel the same way about working from office. Instead of dreading about the time you spend there, make the best out of it. \
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Just like Alex said, SDE1 need not to be in most of the meetings. Simply requesting your meeting organizer with a message "Am I needed in this?" goes a long way. \
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Like Rahul said, headphones usually work here too, ofc it depends on the team's mindset but I have noticed people respect others when they manage their time well

Product team should own, wait for it..., the product. You being in every small meeting shows a gap in the product manager's ownership. Your expectations are not wrong. Some products are complex and its just that they might need a little more time to get acquainted with your business. \
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There is a fine line between you being a consultant for them (obviously outside your role's responsibility) and doing the business evaluation work for them. Try to stick to the former as much as you can. 

This is also a great opportunity for you to emerge as a trusted leader. Understand the product manager's working model, setup a workflow within your team, update your trackers, write clear docs, requirements for your existing product and at some point - hand it over to the product manager and let them know that they are the qualified expert to handle it.   \
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Also, feel free to decline meetings if there are alternative means to provide updates. 

You've got a good point. A senior engineer does scale their impact on a few other engineers and the overall product. However, the impact doesn't stop at their own team, it does scale across teams/orgs/businesses. In Big tech, one team rarely owns a product or a service end to end. 

Getting promoted to your next level is not a 0-sum game. Unfortunately some teams/orgs use that as bargaining chips to get more out of a mid/junior engineer. If you think you are in such a team, its best to look for a new team. 

Everything you need to learn about native iOS and Android is already provided by Alex and Rahul.\
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I'll give you my perspective as a Tech lead in one of the Big Tech companies. I have been doing Android for over 10 years and roughly 6 years ago, I was exposed to [React Native](https://reactnative.dev/). I hated Javascript before learning React. My mentor advised to me have a diverse perspective and look at each framework as a tool to get my job done.\
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I learned React native - became an expert at my company eventually. After moving into Big Tech, that skill of building product on both platforms helped me greatly. I would also encourage to get your native app fundamentals right on at least one platform before trying cross platform work.

Bala Ram

Adding to what Rahul and David suggested:

It's also good to have a business impact added to the problems/projects you worked on. A problem may be complex but its real value is tied to your business. By talking about how you approached and prioritized the problems to serve the best value for your business a good skill to demonstrate.

Discussion topics:

- Why Flutter will take over the industry
- Which Android API Google will unnecessarily deprecate next
- The most broken and missing SwiftUI APIs
- The best posts in <https://www.reddit.com/r/mAndroidDev/>
- What the iOS equivalent of r/mAndroidDev is
- How your company is currently making an in-house server-driven UI solution for mobile and is failing miserably

Alex will pay for your coffee.