I agree that Staff engineer is in practice the closest thing to the old Architect title. I still think this approach is better. If nothing else it's a shift in

I agree that Staff engineer is in practice the closest thing to the old Architect title. I still think this approach is better. If nothing else it's a shift in the responsibly of architecture. In the most rancid organizations there are silos where devs only code and architects only design. The joke of the Ivory Tower Architect is real. On the other hand as a dev II (between junior and senior) I was asked to design and implement a large scale green field distributed system that interacts with other teams. Our ladder and job titles not only allow this, but it's encouraged and sometimes expected.