Depending on the company, this could also be a senior architect, technical fellow, or something similar. Or just an engineering manager or tech lead. It's hard to know from the outside exactly what each role really means.

My employer has Technical Fellow at the top of the architect job family. It's equivalent to a director or senior director in seniority, but remains an individual contributor. These are the people creating (or more accurately, enabling the creation of) the really amazing software here.

But, given the business we're in, the software they build is never going to enter the common lexicon like Uber or Google or whatever.

And I'm a little confused by your "most companies are consumers" comment. Sure, in a literal sense, most software projects are built using tools written by somebody else. If you want to be building those tools, you need to get a job at someplace that builds tools (which usually means proving yourself an expert in a particular niche/tool/whatever). But, there's plenty of software between "simple CRUD" and "creators the next [impactful tool or infrastructure]"