[larve]

I feel that turning to leadership (tech leadership, but also pure engineering management) can be a natural "tinkerer" progression. If you want bigger impact, you turn to more "abstraction", and use tooling and patterns to fill out the details. In this case, you can consider that your role is to give broad directions. They are very important directions, because they shape the "design space" of the problem you are trying to solve.

After that, you have a set of "programming tools" (I don't want it to sound mechanistic, because it is the opposite of that), which are your team and reports, and they will be able to fill in the details (and the details here can be significant pieces of design and architecture by themselves). And your role is to choose the right tools, and allow them to work to their full potential. This means clearing obstacles, clear communication, technical help at times, mentorship, aligning expectations and giving them clear paths for growth.

All these things can be considered engineering at a larger scale. You want to get a really big system shipped and productive? This is the work, these are the skills you need.