This gets tough. My company also loosely views Senior as the pinnacle of technical achievement with Lead and Principal engineers essentially being much higher l

This gets tough. My company also loosely views Senior as the pinnacle of technical achievement with Lead and Principal engineers essentially being much higher level with no direct reports, but still doing policy, stakeholder, and political activities. Recently, some have pointed out the flaws in such a system as it leaves out the potential for promoting and giving a pay raise to senior staff that have continued making themselves far more valuable, but don't want to be capped or go into politics. There needs to be a path for someone who is just beast on the technical side and can be brought out to solve any problem. If that person is an order of magnitude more knowledgeable than your seniors, then they deserve to be distinguished as such. Our competitors that have figured this out have titles to better reflect this reality.