The best advice I can give is to reach out and talk to people. Cold emails, calls, etc. . . . It's uncomfortable as an engineer, believe me. But the way to get the work you want is to reach out and search for it.
I have a pretty deep network but I get more than half of my gigs from new contacts. The deep connex are far more important for references and social proof than they are for generating work (though they're good for that too)
