Comment by HeyLaughingBoy

I've been in the industry for over 30 years (yikes!) and I can assure you that job satisfaction is transient at best.

Start by understanding both what you want to do and what you really don't want to do and understand that over time, both of these will probably change.

In most organizations, in order to make the most impact, you have to be at Management level. I think this is causing you some conflict, because you want to be impactful, but yet don't want a CTO-type position. As an Individual Contributor, even as a tech lead, people "above" you really just want you to keep your head down and keep cranking out product. Like it or not, titles have meaning. If you want to make changes, your position in the company needs to be one where they expect change to come from, or you need to get really good at pushing your ideas to others and you have to know those people well.

It's going to be difficult to be an upper-level tech employee at a smaller company and not manage people. The separation between technology lead and manager/supervisor tends to only happen at larger companies that can afford that specialization.

It may sound trite, but the reality is that you have to understand just what kind of job you want and then devote your energy towards finding that job.