You asked smart questions and see if I can answer you.
Engineering jobs are mostly following specification. You will see yourself
mostly digging into a confined (operating) environment looking for a
solution.
What you're looking for is whatever project that uses low level programming
languages such as C/C++ to write operating or embedded systems. Thus, a lot
changes to use your talent. For those high level languages such as Java, php
, perl and ... you really are using the existing libraries. (T