Employee level and performance review in Microsoft

Topic 1: Regarding Level

In general, a college grad dev or PM will start at 59.

59 and 60 are level 1 (ie, PM)
61 and 62 are level 2 (ie, PM II)
63 and 64 are Senior (ie, Senior PM)
65 through 67 are Principal
68+ are Partner, Director, GM, etc.

Titles like "lead" or "group" are management titles and do NOT relate to levels/salary. Each level has a "target" and "maximum" bonus associated with it. Levels also have geographic offsets.

Topic 2: Regarding Performance

For progressing from one title/level to the next comes about through promotions.  Microsoft has a forced curve rating system.  It has tweaked it over the years, but right now it is basically:

1 - top 20%
2 - next 20%
3 - next 40%
4 - next 13%
5 - next 7%

and employees are curved against their peer groups.  1, 2, and 3 are considered performing fine, 4 on the border of acceptable (wrong side of border), and 5's as in trouble (often, but not always, on a path to be managed out).

Note：
It is a lot harder to get promotions that cross bands (60 to 61, 62 to 63, 64 to 65) than it is to get promotions with in the bands.  And as you move up each band it becomes more important to get promotional support from your uncles/aunts, grandparents, and great-uncles/great-aunts in the org chart (which leads to the need for greater "visibility" to succeed).

The distribution of employees in level, at least in engineering, is a bell curve with a peak, iirc, at level 62 (and I think 63 slightly ahead of 61).

It is generally a fast pace if an employee gets promoted one level per year. It is very uncommon for an employee to get promoted more than once in a year(but it happens in exceptional situations).