With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note. If he spends that much time “coding”, that barely qualifies as a “senior” at large tech companies.
My own anecdote is that the level of work I was doing as an “architect” at a 60 person startup where I was the second technical hire when the new CTO was hired to bring tech leadership in house from a third party consulting company mapped to a mid level L5 consultant at AWS ProServe (to be fair I only had two and a half years of AWS experience at the time I was hired by AWS) and now while I’m a “Staff consultant” at a third party AWS consulting firm with around 1000 people, looking at the leveling guidelines and expectations at my current company, AWS and GCP, it maps to a “senior”
The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.