"We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers. (In theory, anyway, we’re not perfect.) So we’re looking for people who have peer leadership skills, who are great at teamwork, who will take ownership and make decisions on their own."
They usually repackage people’s work around them into their own, take ownership and defend loudly their territory (project ownership) and methodically build relationships with leadership. Having “leadership skills” and being good a team work are often orthogonal to each other.
No, it's actually people who can put together a technical plan and drive its execution with other engineers, or who can clarify complex problems esp. when there are conflicting opinions, or who can see problems before they become disasters and organize the right group of people to take care of it...
There are many examples of leadership, which have nothing to do with the sour view of managing-up or taking credit for others' work.
If you're not lucky enough to have management that's exactly technically aligned to your project someone has to be managing up and paying attention to leadership or else expectations will be totally off from reality.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091201-00/?p=15...
"FAANG" isn't a "level", it's just a cluster.