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Your level of engineering seniority is the highest level at which you can reliably assess others' levels.

In other words, if you can easily differentiate between juniors and mid-level engineers but struggle to determine whether someone from a peer team is a staff engineer or a senior staff engineer, your own level is likely mid. If you can distinguish between a staff engineer and a senior staff engineer but find it unclear whether someone is a principal engineer or a VP, you’re probably a staff engineer.

Levels above staff are largely about how your peers perceive you in terms of the scope you can handle and the [soft] authority you can exercise to make things happen. It's largely about the trust you earn within your peer group, and how well you can exercise that trust when working with peer teams or more distant teams.

In other words, if your team perceives you as a principal engineer, chances are, other teams will too. And if your company refuses to give you that title, chances are, some other company will. This process is well-converging overall, and both your manager and that other company's hiring manager understand it very well.

But the precondition is that your mind can clearly interpret all the signals for your desired level.

Once you can accurately observe all these signals, reaching that level becomes a short-term exercise in flexing your emotional intelligence. "Short-term" might mean a year for senior staff and maybe three years for a VP. High-level roles do require growth. But it's still a relatively short section on one's journey. As on, after figuring out the signals and calibrating your "level guessing" / "level assessing" apparatus, the rest is peanuts. 

The hot take is that once a person can see and navigate these signs clearly, if they’re committed to working on themselves to reach the level they understand well, it almost inevitably happens rather soon.

So, if professional growth excites you, focus on playing the personal quiz game of how and why certain people are at the level they are. The signal might be noisy, since companies do make mistakes in leveling — oh, they do. But with a large enough sample size, say 20+ people at the level you're targeting and observing, the signal will greatly outweigh the noise.