I tried to explain that in my original comment, but did a poor job. They can promote you, but you keep your role. i.e. you can be promoted to "VP of Web Development" essentially. So your role doesn't change, but your responsibilities related to engineering can increase.

This can lead to some pretty weird hierarchy where a people manager at the director level is managing an engineering manager at the VP level. However, I feel it is a pretty interesting environment and lets both "knowledge works" and "people managers" be rewarded on equal footing.

Does the "VP of Web Development" get paid on par with the VP of Marketing or VP of Sales?