'Principal' in a lot of NZ companies just replaced the term 'Team Lead' and generally just means the most 'senior' person in the team. Sometimes it's used as a

'Principal' in a lot of NZ companies just replaced the term 'Team Lead' and generally just means the most 'senior' person in the team. Sometimes it's used as a way to justify a raise. The scale of difference and difference of scale between New Zealand and the USA cannot be overstated. There really are not enough people in New Zealand to make the level of differentiation between a Senior, a Principal and a Staff engineer meaningful in the vast, vast majority of our industry. The titles are basically pointless and just word salad. They're also used very differently company to company, although I don't think that's unique to this geography.