Almost <i>everybody</i> in the eng organization is a "software engineer". When I started, my boss's boss, responsible for all search features, was titled "software engineer". He's since been promoted to "Google Fellow", but his LinkedIn still says "software engineer".<p>It's sort of the opposite of a bank. At a bank, typically anyone who's been there 5+ years is titled "VP", even if they're basically a branch manager responsible for half a dozen reports. At Google, the people who do VP-level work are often still titled "software engineer". (Considering many of them started back into 1999 and got a good chunk of Google stock for pennies, they probably out-earn those bank VPs by about 1000:1.)