How to create influence in a team of Mid-Level Engineers?

If it was me, I would look to create opportunities. I would also change the objective function here. It sounds like everyone on the team sees an opportunity created for them and fights for it. However, that's all about them. If you are instead trying to improve the product and project, find what will help the product the most. That will naturally lead you to the most impact.

Taro has a lot of videos with examples of projects that have the scope to help people make mid-level, senior, and staff project. Those often involve finding pain points (e.g. in the development process, for customers, etc.) and addressing them. Do that start to end. Find a high-impact opportunity, gather objective proof it needs to be addressed, then create a prototype solution. Present it and gain consensus. It's obviously something you are leading then. Once you convince others it is important, they can help you. And you can do it well, leading an improvement start-to-end. Including gaining adoption, documenting it, selling it, and measuring the impact at the end.

Occasionally, you are lucky and given scope within a project (e.g. retiring engineers or engineers who are promoted and give it to you). That's what many people are looking for. However, the thing most within your control is creating scope that delivers value. That's also most valuable for the product and makes the strongest case for a promotion, in my opinion.

Can you partition the influence into various segments so you can focus on one?

Perhaps another way of phrasing this is from the knowledge perspective. Influence comes from having more knowledge about a specific (important) area, so that people naturally come to you with questions.

Can you find a segment that is less crowded and become the expert on that? In the ticket backlog process you mentioned, too many people are raising their hand, so it's hard for you to have the influence you're looking for.

However, if you dominate the knowledge about something specific that people care about (on-call process, feature rollouts, a new tool), you will organically become influential. Some important notes:

• This requires making a bet on something that you think will become more important. (Yes, there is some element of luck here.)
• You also need to ensure you "market" your knowledge and share it with the team in a helpful way, as discussed here.
• One way to find an under-served domain is create the domain! i.e. invent a new debug tool or introduce a helpful new process for your team. This becomes increasingly common at higher levels, and it's what David mentioned above!