That does seem to pretty clearly be what they meant, given the rest of the sentence.

There are usually three main levels people talk about, entry, mid career, and sr. If you say SDE, I'd assume a mid-career person, which is 100% earning way more then 150k in Seattle. https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... has more data.

In Big Tech(tm) you’d have at least lead/staff and principal on top of those levels, who make even more.