In a smaller company it's not hard for "invisible" (like CI) contributions to be actually seen and noticed by both leadership and by the people you work with every day. And on the other hand, if you're a dev working on product and getting work done is a lot harder than it should be, you've got a strong incentive to pause product work and focus on "maintenance" work.
When almost a quarter of the company (15 devs) can both see and feel your contribution to make their lives easier and more productive, you've got a pretty strong political position even if you aren't directly producing product. This is true even if you produce, say, an internal dashboard: you're known as the one dev who took time out to help the 20 sales people sell better (or whatever); you know their names, and they know yours.
