How can multiple senior engineers be on a team?

Good question! The answer really is just that most high-performing engineering teams will have multiple senior projects. Back when I was at Instagram Ads, we always had minimum 3 big projects going on at the same time (this was stressful, but it's why FAANG engineers get paid the big bucks haha).

A project can also be so big (Staff or Senior Staff level) that it can be decomposed into multiple senior-level sub-projects. I have also seen this where the team just gets 1 massive project for the half, and it's just so big that it can "feed" the entire team.

But I also hear the opposite is classic scarcity mindset and this isn’t Ivy League admissions for L4-L5 at top tech companies where 3 mid levels clear the next level bar consistently but only one can make it and the others are stuck until they switch teams or get put on a pip.

On a quick note, Amazon is notorious for this ☠️

This is why it's so important to have good engineering managers and executives. If a team doesn't have enough scope, things become a zero-sum game and you get scarcity mindset -> Hunger Games. I have seen this many, many times as well.

A lot of engineering is like 4D chess, especially at Big Tech where there's so many engineers who need meaty scope to justify their huge TCs.