Most common approaches to ethical and social responsibility in engineering are insufficient to addressing the growing need to ensure engineers and technologists serve the common good. In particular, professional codes of ethics, grand challenges and social entrepreneurship, and corporate adoption of self-policed ethical principles are often toothless in shaping individual and corporate behavior and tend to reinscribe irresponsible technocratic ideologies at the heart of engineering culture. Erin Cech argues there is a “culture of disengagement” in engineering that depoliticizes engineering, separates and differentially values technical and social aspects of engineering work, and embraces the problematic values and worldview of meritocracy. Looking beyond STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and STEM education to civic education and democratic theory, I argue civic professionalism, based on the work of Harry Boyte and Albert Dzur, offers a framing of professional identity and practice to engineers which articulates a positive ethics of virtue and resists technocratic forms of professionalism. It proactively engages in the broader sociopolitical questions connected to engineering work and embraces a democratic epistemology and way of working. Educating engineers to become civic professionals will require cultivating reflexivity and civic skills and virtues, and the creation of experiential learning opportunities that engage authentically with sociopolitical complexity.