I'm not super familiar with big companies, having worked mostly at startups with less structured "levels", but is there a separate scale or set of levels for managers? Or can you be "Senior SWE" and a manager at Google for example?
It’s essentially the same in internal levels just different title. For instance at Microsoft most managers are Principal level. And google most are atleast l5. (with some exceptions). But instead of being called principal engineer they are called principal engineering manager.
