[p0ints]

> How to get into those heavily engineering oriented firms, like JPL or NVidia, doing the low level stuff?

Maybe first try to talk to someone who does that kind of work, to see if it's even appealing to you? I say this because my understanding of this issue is very similar to the parent poster - no matter what the domain, programming as a career WILL be dominated by dealing with large and ugly code bases, where your main struggle will be to understand them and then try to make intelectually trivial changes in a non-breaking manner. For example, I spoke with people who developed GPU drivers, and they said that the code base was an insufferable mess, and that they escaped it to do something theoretically much more mundane, but at least with much less preexisting code.

My gloomy conclusion is that software engineering is not the best career choice for someone creative and intellectually curious. It's just too dull.