A Senior at Meta is a Staff at Stripe and a Principal at a startup. Here's how it actually maps.

Every engineer eventually faces this puzzle. A recruiter from a competitor calls. The offer is for "Staff Engineer." You're a Senior Engineer at your current company. Is this a promotion? Or is it a sideways move with a fancier business card?

The answer depends on what kind of company is making the offer. The same title can mean three very different things at three different company types — and getting the translation wrong is how engineers end up taking pay cuts they didn't realize they were taking, or turning down legitimate promotions because the title looked smaller on paper.

This post is the side-by-side reference. We'll walk through how levels actually map across FAANG, scale-ups, and startups; what the scope of work looks like at each level; how the compensation actually compares; and how to translate your own title when you're sizing up an offer from a different company type.

The Three Ladders: Structural Differences

Before mapping specific titles, it's worth understanding why the ladders look different in the first place. Each company type has structural pressures that shape how it does leveling.

FAANG (Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and adjacent companies) need a ladder that scales to tens of thousands of engineers. The ladder has to make calibration possible across hundreds of teams. It has to produce predictable comp bands that finance can model. It has to give a 22-year-old new grad a visible path to retire-at-50 levels. The result is the deepest ladder — Google goes from L3 to L10, Meta from E3 to E9 — with very explicit scope definitions at every step.

Scale-ups (companies in the 500 to 5,000-engineer range — Stripe, Snowflake, Cloudflare, MongoDB, GitLab, and similar) need a real ladder because they're too big for ad-hoc leveling, but they don't have the engineering population to support 8+ distinct levels. They typically run 5–7 IC levels, often consciously modeled on FAANG with the top levels compressed. The senior bar tends to be similar to FAANG; the principal/distinguished bar is harder to reach because there are simply fewer roles.

Startups (under 300 engineers, often under 50) typically don't have a real ladder for the first few years. Titles get handed out based on what someone did before they joined, or what they negotiated in their offer, or what's needed to recruit the next person. A "Staff Engineer" at a 30-person company often just means "the most senior engineer who wasn't a founder." This isn't necessarily wrong — at that scale, scope is more about what someone is willing to own than about a published rubric — but it means titles don't translate cleanly.

FAANG: The Reference Ladder

FAANG ladders are the most rigorously published and well-understood. Two are worth knowing in detail because every other ladder is implicitly compared to them.

Meta (E-series)

Meta runs an E-series ladder from E3 (entry) through E9 (Fellow). The most common positions:

Meta's up-or-out pressure exists from E3 to E5; once you hit E5, promotion to E6 and above is genuinely optional. Reported total comp at E5 typically lands in the high four-hundred-thousand range; E6 lands in the high six-hundred-thousand range; E7 can clear seven figures. The deltas between levels at the top are large because scope expands fast.

Google (L-series)

Google's ladder runs L3 through L10. The structure is conceptually similar to Meta's:

L3-to-L4 promotion typically takes 2–3 years, L5-to-L6 takes 3–5 years, and L6 and above can take 5+ years per promotion. Total comp scales aggressively at the top: L5 lands in the low-to-mid four hundreds, L6 in the half-million-to-seven-fifty range, L7 and L8 can clear a million.

Amazon (SDE-series)

Amazon uses SDE-1, SDE-2, SDE-3 for the early ladder, then Principal Engineer, Senior Principal, and Distinguished Engineer at the top. The compression is real — SDE-3 at Amazon is roughly equivalent to L5/E5 at Google or Meta, but the next level (Principal) jumps directly to what Google calls L7. That makes the SDE-3 to Principal jump unusually large.

Total comp medians for Amazon land lower than Google or Meta at every IC level — SDE-1 typically in the high one-hundreds, SDE-2 in the high two-hundreds, SDE-3 in the low-to-mid four-hundreds — because Amazon historically anchors more comp in stock that vests on a back-loaded 5/15/40/40 schedule.

Scale-Ups: The Compressed Ladder

Scale-up companies usually publish 5–7 IC levels. The most common structure looks like:

The senior bar at a scale-up tends to be similar to the FAANG senior bar — they're hiring from the same talent pool and want to keep the comparison clean. The compression happens at the top. Where FAANG has L7, L8, and L9 as distinct tiers, a scale-up will often collapse those into one Principal and one Distinguished level. The bar for Principal at Stripe or Databricks is high because there are simply fewer of them — typically one for every 200–400 engineers.

Total compensation at scale-ups varies significantly by company — top-tier scale-ups like Stripe pay at or above FAANG rates at the same level, with more variance in equity overall. A Staff Engineer at Databricks in 2026 typically clears over a million in total comp; a Principal can clear significantly more depending on equity refresh and stock performance.

Startups: The Anti-Ladder

Startups under 300 engineers — and especially under 50 — usually don't have a real leveling framework. The titles get assigned for a mix of recruiting, negotiation, and structural reasons:

• Recruiting. A "Staff Engineer" offer is more attractive than a "Senior Engineer" offer to a candidate considering a comp cut. Inflated titles are a cheap way to compete with FAANG offers when you can't match cash.
• Retention. Once one engineer has a Staff title, the next person hired at a comparable level gets it too. Title compression at startups happens upward.
• Scope absorption. At a 30-person company, the most senior engineer is doing legitimately Staff-level work — owning the entire platform, mentoring everyone else, making architecture decisions that affect the whole company. The title isn't entirely fictional; it just reflects the breadth of scope rather than a calibrated bar.
• Founding titles. "Founding Engineer" is essentially an honorific for the first 5–10 engineering hires. It carries no specific scope and doesn't translate at all — a Founding Engineer can be anywhere from an E4 to a Director by FAANG mapping, depending on what they actually built.

The typical startup leveling pattern, when one exists at all, is two or three IC levels (Engineer, Senior Engineer, Staff Engineer) with a separate management track that often gets created only when a founder finally hires a VP of Engineering. Anything more than that at a sub-100-engineer company is usually aspirational scaffolding.

The Translation Table

Here's a side-by-side mapping you can use when switching company types. These are approximate — every company calibrates differently and every individual case has nuance — but the table captures the general shape.

Read this table by row, not by column. The right way to translate is to find the row that matches what you actually do day-to-day, then read across to see what that scope is called at each company type.

What This Means for Comp

The cash compensation gap is the most consistent pattern: FAANG tends to offer the most predictable cash comp, scale-up pay varies widely by company (top-tier names like Stripe match or exceed FAANG), startups land at 50–75% depending on stage and how cash-poor they are. The gap is supposed to be made up in equity. Whether it actually is depends entirely on whether the equity ever liquidates.

A useful heuristic: if you're moving from FAANG to a startup for a "bigger" title, assume the equity is worth zero when you do the math. If the offer still works on cash alone, the title is a bonus. If the cash is significantly lower and the only thing closing the gap is hypothetical equity, you're taking a real pay cut for a title that may or may not transfer back if the startup doesn't make it.

The Title-Inflation Trap (Both Directions)

Title inflation runs in both directions and creates two distinct failure modes.

Going startup-to-FAANG with an inflated title: A Staff Engineer at a 40-person startup applies to Meta and is offered E5 (Senior) instead of E6 (Staff). On paper this looks like a demotion. In reality, the FAANG recruiter has calibrated against the actual scope of the work — and the candidate, even doing genuinely good work, was probably not operating at the multi-team, cross-org scope that Meta's E6 requires. Taking the E5 offer is usually the right move; trying to negotiate up to E6 without the demonstrable scope to back it up usually fails.

Going FAANG-to-startup expecting a comp match: A Senior Engineer at Google (L5) gets an offer for Staff Engineer at a Series B startup. The title is bigger; the base is 25% lower; the equity is in private stock that may liquidate in 5 years or never. The engineer takes the offer expecting the equity to bridge the comp gap and is disappointed when it doesn't. This is the more common failure: level transferred up, comp transferred down, and the equity was lottery-ticket money.

How to Translate Your Own Title for an Offer

When you're evaluating an offer from a different company type, do this in order:

1. Write down what you actually own. The systems, the team size you affect, the kind of decisions you make alone, the cross-functional dependencies. Not your title — your actual scope.
2. Find the row in the translation table that matches. Map to FAANG levels as the reference, even if you're going to a startup or scale-up.
3. Compare against the target company's published rubric. If they publish one, great. If not, ask the recruiter or hiring manager directly what their level definitions look like.
4. Run the comp math twice — once with the equity at face value, once with the equity at zero. If the offer only works with the equity at face value, you're taking a real risk that's not being priced in.
5. Trust the scope, distrust the title. If the scope is bigger but the title is the same, that's a good move. If the title is bigger but the scope is the same or smaller, the title is doing all the work — and titles don't transfer when you leave.

If you're trying to figure out where a specific company sits on this map, the easiest way is to look at the actual work. Browse our company culture directory for engineering-focused companies, read how Stripe and Databricks structure their teams, or see what the Staff Engineer path actually looks like in 2026.