Non faang pay for principal engineers in Mountain View could be estimated roughly by using stack overflow’s salary calculator. Mountain View, react, typescript, aws, postgres, linux, 20 years experience, no degree lists $187,000 for the 50th percentile.
I think the discussion gets confusing because as an industry we suck at describing levels of the technical track in a portable way.
I do know senior engineers making 150k in the Bay Area. I also know some making 750k.