The only time I've seen anyone really do half of what this books describes as a "Staff Engineer" was at a small(ish) hardware company, PowerVR, where the OpenGLES driver team was 5-6 people, the team lead was a
developer and architect who also did a bit of management, rather than the other way round. Then there was a manager on top of them in turn for multiple teams, but they weren't involved in the technicals at all, not even in the loosest "architecture design" ways, they purely did the people management.
In a larger company now, still working on GPU drivers (AMD, but not the "main" platform), there's a couple of people who might do a bit of this, but feels more like you get specific domain experts rather than anyone designated by the company. The team is notably larger than at PowerVR, and there is a "Manager" who is more involved in doing things like placating customers and prioritizing work and issues, but again completely uninvolved in the actual development.
In none of these examples does the job title have any relation to the differences in their work, both used completely different stacks of terms and difficult to compare cross-company.
But I guess it's all "Hardcore Engineering", and even the newest members of the team are expected to design systems themselves. Hell, straight out of university at PowerVR I was designing and implementing my own stuff, and significant systems not just following an already concrete architecture. But it was a small enough team everyone was involved in feedback, and I did feedback to them in turn. So I guess GPU drivers are still greaybeard "Hardcore Engineering"?
This may be helped by driver development often being pretty well defined, you have a spec (which you may have been involved with designing, but very much a large collaboration), you have hardware architects and another team trying to figure out the next generation might look (are they the "true" architects here?).