> Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service?

As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years.

The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, and maintained trumps all else.

And yes we can see through the bullshit. Everyone has built a “semantic document retrieval system” in the last 3 years. That’s a weekend project, gonna need a little more to be impressive :)

Role is a combination of title + company.

Head of Eng at 50 person startup (with 25 engineers) might be Manager 2 at FAANG.

So I mostly ignore the title and look at the work history and YOE.

Important to who?

As an engineer, I just want to get an idea of where this person is at in their learning journey and what their personality is like, do they have certain intangibles, etc.

The recruiter who screens the person before they ever talk to me, on the other hand...

I have no idea what goes on in the minds of HR people.

I ignore job titles on resumes. I want to know what they did, I don't care what their company called them.