I imagine it was HR BS. They had to call you that to pay you X. You are worth X. But they needed to match the title to it. From what I have read Staff Engineer

I imagine it was HR BS. They had to call you that to pay you X. You are worth X. But they needed to match the title to it. From what I have read Staff Engineer is mostly architecture/meetings/people management, and being across a very large team. If you are doing that it might be Staff Engineer, but if you are mostly coding it probably isn't. Either way it doesn't matter. It is just another title.