The level you get offered is the level you sounded like

Every interviewer is answering two questions. Can this person do the job, and at what level do they operate.

The second determines your title, your scope and your salary band, and it is answered from evidence you produce without being asked for it. Most candidates never realise it is being asked.

Here is the thing that took me too long to articulate. Level is not measured by how much you know. It is measured by the size of the thing you talk about owning.

A mid-level engineer talks about tasks. I built the feature, I fixed the bug, I implemented the screen.

A senior engineer talks about outcomes and trade-offs. I chose this approach because the alternative would not survive our offline requirement.

A staff engineer talks about mechanisms and other people. I changed how we review architecture decisions so this class of problem stops arriving.

All three can be describing the same year of work. The difference in what they are offered is substantial.

Nobody corrects you on this. They write down the level they heard.

The fix, and it is an hour.

Take your three strongest CV bullets and convert each from a task into a decision with a consequence. The pattern: the situation and the constraint, the decision you made, what you chose against, and what changed as a result.

If you cannot fill in what you chose against, that is a bullet where you executed rather than decided. That is fine, and it should not be one of your three strongest.

Then say them out loud. The version you can say under pressure is the version that counts.

One warning in the other direction. Do not claim scope you did not have. It fails immediately, because the follow-up questions are about the decisions, and someone who did not make them cannot describe the alternatives they rejected.

You are not inflating. You are just no longer deflating.