alt Hacker NewsNot a staff engineer, but this sounds very much like what I do and then am not allowed to follow up on. One particular company where I've been several times as senior or lead developer, I just keep stumbling over problems I would love to take on. I'd love to be a staff engineer there with the freedom to take on these sort of problems, but that's apparently just not how they work.
You definitely need a technical leadership or leaders who understand the staff level value. You also need sponsorship. And you need to accept you maybe propose 5 things and only 1 gets funded and then 3 years later a previous proposal fits the zeitgeist and gets funded.