The size of the company is a big factor as well. When I was running a small in house team at Sound United, I couldn’t afford to have a lot of layers of designers. I had two directors below me and everyone was either staff or senior staff below them. When I was at Nike and frog however, the organizations could support different roles for someone who still wanted to be paid a lot, but didn’t want to manage. In both cases these positions were called “principal designer” and were essentially like a super senior designer. Typically the person was super efficient, needed little to no oversight, and was too good to let slip away to the competition.
Those roles exist but in my experience they are typically someone who comes up from the inside, maybe has a manager or director position for a few years and realizes it is not what they want or are good at.
And, by the way, I totally get it. I enjoy both ends of the spectrum, leading a team, setting the vision, as well as rolling up my sleeves and doing the work (isn’t that why we got into this?) so ultimately starting my own studio was the right move.
Finding the right position is very complex. There are a lot of factors and they change on both the job seeker and employer sides of things as time goes on. What an organization needs today is not what it needs tomorrow. What you need today is not what you will need tomorrow. It tends to work better when someone embraces the chaos of it and realized that paths overlap for only so long. sometimes they cross right over each other, sometimes they run parallel and never touch. In rare cases the align for long periods of time.