In the European companies they are not. From my experience (UK Financial Services primarily), they are equivalent to a US Staff Engineer with authority over Design and Implementation. Typically looking after a team or two of engineers of various levels of experience.

There's also a broad amount of "socialising" the design/system internally to generate "buy-in" across the organisation. Which is the tedious bit for me, but hey, the money is good.

Sometimes they are, but that's not what you want. Other times, it's like what you've described but unfortunately with much less (or even zero) hand-on work, and more meetings and dealing with internal bureucracy.

BTW to me, it looks like what you want is a tech lead role.