I work on developer tools at google, and it's not even remotely one of the prestigious teams. it is however the most fun and interesting time I've ever had in a job, and if I left it would only be for the same kind of work.

also you seem to have fallen for the same fallacy as the people who complain about open source devs not working on what they consider sufficiently important problems. trust me, there are no shortage of engineers willing and eager to work on end user problems, and the dev tools work enables them to deliver solutions to those problems faster, and makes those solutions work more reliably. it's a rising tide that lifts everyone's boats, not a zero sum game.