It's just a property of the artifact you're building. You're designing a process instead of a product. The artifact you produce is a description of that process--code.

The closet thing I can think of is anyone who works on processes instead of products. If you look at disciplines that design processes, the larger the scope of the process, the less exact the methods to design them (mainly because the number of variables grows too large).

At one end, industrial engineers who design assembly lines have very rigorous design methodologies backed by math and empirical data. At the other extreme you have politicians designing the process of running a country, and their methodologies are almost never based on math or empirical evidence.

One way I've heard it described is kind of midway between an industrial engineer and a politician--When designing a large scale software system, you should be like an urban planner. You decide what kind of zoning you need--residential over here, commercial over there. Then you build the roads and other infrastructure that connects the various districts.