It’s way more than a “pay grade” for any company with real leveling guidelines.

This jibes with both my personal experience at BigTech, knowing the industry and various publicly available leveling guidelines. Sone are more granular

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/

The company I work for now has similar leveling guidelines, it’s also more granular.

But levels are defined by scope, impact, and dealing with ambiguity