1 on 1 Meetings Q&A and Videos

Hello I joined a new company as a senior swe earlier this month and have met everyone on my team but I'm new to big companies so not sure how to approach a skip level meeting?

The reason I'm asking is I've seen a lot of people and posts talking about skip level relationships.

1. Am I supposed to set up a meeting myself or wait for them to set it up?

2. Should I tell my manager I'm talking to my skip level ie his manager?

As a software engineer with 5 years of varied experience, now in a tech lead role at a large company focused on business-oriented full-stack/fintech projects, how can I effectively pivot my career towards more technical domains, such as database engineering or developer tooling?

Should I transition to a different department? Different company?

What strategies can I use to develop domain-specific skills (e.g., compilers) that aren't directly related to my current job responsibilities?

Context:

I've bounced around a bit over the past 5 years of my career, and I'm in my first big tech role as a tech lead.

I've had to step up and laser focus my time and energy due to the demands of this job, needing to learn a lot about the business needs to deliver impact in my role.

I realize that my past roles I never really picked up how much the business domain and project domain should have mattered to me, because now I feel l'm working on the "wrong" domain and types of problems that inherently interest me.

How do you build relationship with skip manager (executive) when you do not have any meetings with them and you are working remotely?

If I do carve out an opportunity, I'm also afraid that my boss might question why I am trying so hard to build a relationship with his/her manager given I have nothing shared to work on with the executive. If there was, I and the executive would be atleast in some common meetings where I would get the opportunity to build relationship and demonstrate impact.