I've seen companies hire college sophomores who have never heard of the concept of a database and make them Sr Engineers on a analytics teams. I've seen Sr Engineers hired with one year of relevant experience.
At this point, "Sr Engineer" is just the new "Jr Engineer". There's nothing wrong with this, but indeed, Staff Engineer tends to mean 8+ years of experience.
I remember when Systems Administrator was a noble and important profession full of smart, talented people. But a lot of people misunderstood it and made fun of it, so it became an unattractive title, and instead of changing the role, they just made up new titles. Now they're cool and in-demand, and still nobody understands what they do.
("Sr. Prompt Engineer", "Visual Strategist", "Director of Front of House") People want to have some leverage to get things they want done, done. Sys Admin -> DevOps (Cloud) Engineer. Things change. Adapt or die.
If you read IBM's coding standards from 1980 and compared them to Google's from 2000s and then to Today's AI journey, you would have complaints about each. Processes form from people. Change comes from people.
If you arent internalizing the senior title immediately then you will get nowhere
If you’re not forming an LLC and putting yourself as an junior employee of that shell company with some verifiable information or project, then I dont know how to help you