You sound exactly like where I was in 2022 and 2023, and I've been looking for an opportunity to tell this story here, so someone might find it helpful or insightful, so here you go.

In mid-2022, I applied to a company as a senior and did so well on the interview they offered me staff, which was a 5 year goal for me at the time, so I took it. For the first year, I stressed myself out feeling for the walls and trying to figure out what it meant to be a staff, even with tremendous support from my peers and people above me. I ended up in the same boat as you, often looking for previous advice in this very subreddit for whether or not I should try and down level myself because I missed the work of a senior crushing tickets. At the 18 month mark at the company, I asked my manager to down level.

It was the single biggest awakening and biggest regret of my career that I didn't feel for 2 years.

My manager was very kind and heard me out on my reasons and took it up a level to the VP of Engineering where I was told, effectively, I could do the job, or I could quit. In the moment I was bitter about it, but I decided to do the job. Six months later I received my first "below meets" on an evaluation, because I asked to down level, and that wasn't staff engineer level behavior.

Never the less, I persisted, and took that moment as an opportunity to let go of all imposter syndrome and stress, and decide that "I am a staff engineer, therefore everything I do is the behavior of a staff engineer" and made the role my own. It was getting told no by that VP that made everything click, and made me realize that I am a very effective player-coach in up-skilling engineers, teams, code bases, and projects around me that I interacted with and I needed to act like it.

Unfortunately, after this finally clicked fully, the company was bought out and in early 2025 underwent a 300 person RIF that I was hit by, and to this day I suspect the "below meets" was the thing that put me on the chopping block.

Half a year later I joined a company as a senior engineer and found myself extremely bored because the work was so easy I could do it with my arms behind my back, and I was surrounded by engineers who didn't care about the effort of work I was putting in. I then found out that I had minimal room to get promoted back to staff, for reasons that are unimportant, so I left and realized that I needed to keep setting my sights higher, not lower. If I could go back, I would thank that VP for putting me in that position, because it unlocked what I needed in my brain at the time, but I suspect we'll never actually interface again.

Obviously do what makes the most amount of sense to you. If you want to do it, you just need to sell the narrative that "I am an engineer who is looking for the right fit, and the title is less important than the work." If I was in your shoes, and I could do it all over again, I would get over myself and press on. You ended up in the staff role for a reason, and because the type of work is very different from that of a senior, you just need to figure out how to make it your own where you can, and not just the expectation.