Bear in mind that companies at the scale of Space X doing safety critical work tend to parcel up tasks fairly minutely. Everything is compartmentalised, tested separately and there are whole teams devoted to the large scale architecture and integration. There's a joke that back in the space race days, an engineer might be responsible for a single screw on the Saturn V (and you'd be damn sure if the thing blew up, it wasn't your screw that did it). Same thing happens with ESA and NASA contractors.

There are lots of engineers who are basically building things to a spec and aren't what you might call innovating.

I think someone who builds rockets to this level would be absolutely fine in an entry position. They just might need to get some of the theory first. Saying that, he clearly understands mechanical design and control theory.

Didn't one of the chief engineers at SpaceX start out with model rockets?