I personally can't relate, but that's because I've never been in any organization at that scale, biggest companies I've been had employees numbering in the thousands, of which IT was only hundreds at most. There you go as far as having scrum teams with developers, alongside that one or more architect, and "above" that a CTO. Conversely, companies like Google have tens of thousands of people in IT alone.

But likewise, since we're fans of equality in my country, there's no emphasis on career ladders / progression; you're a developer, maybe a lead developer or architect, and then you get to management, with the only distinguishing factor being your years of experience, length of your CV, and pay grade. Pay grade is "simply" bumped up every year based on performance of both you personally and the company as a whole.

But that's n=1 experience, our own company is moving towards a career ladder system now as well. Not nearly as extensive as the big companies' though.