I am fine with the so-called career path and leveling. What rubbed me the wrong way is that no one bothered mentioning it even though sneaked it into the offer letter. It is my mistake that I didn't catch it until it was too late. :(
That is what I am doing - calling myself a 'Senior Software Engineer' in my current job. As someone who has been a "Senior software engineer" in the past couple of jobs, it would definitely look odd to say that I am a "Software Engineer - 2" in my current job as that would look like a stepdown in level.
Anonymous because I work there. I applied for a senior software engineer role and the interview process was similar. I got the job offer at the end of the process and they sneakily changed the role to "Software Engineer 2" from the "Senior software engineer" role mentioned so prominently in the job postings and the interview invites. No one bothered mentioning this in any of the many face-to-face and email conversations that I had with people/managers/director/HR from Canonical. I wouldn't have applied for the job if they had not lied that it was for a senior software engineer role.
Due to my bad luck and my excitement about the job, I missed catching this till my first week at Canonical. This was a big mistake and I should have done better. When I found out about this and spoke to my manager about this, I got some ambiguous answer about how they mention "senior" in the job description to weed out junior folks from applying and that "software engineer 2" would be the appropriate role according to their internal engineering career path. He and his successor both agreed to pass on the feedback to the upper management but I am not sure if they did and if the feedback made any difference.
I ended up continuing since the team and the work was good. But this is unprofessional and unacceptable.