L8 and L9 are Director/Senior Director positions. In the software engineering family of career ladders, it is part of the Engineering Manager career ladder, which generally starts at L6, with occasional L5 managers (L5 SWE individual contributors transitioning to manager track).
The technical/individual contributor track also has L8 and L9 Director/Senior Director levels. Sometimes it's referred to as a "Principal" level in Product Areas like Cloud, but there are far fewer L8+ people on individual contributor career ladders (i.e. tracks) than on management ladders.
L8 is considered the start of Google's "executive levels," where individuals at this level and above are privy to executive-level training, perks, etc.
Google Fellows are generally L10 (i.e. Vice President equivalent level), if I recall correctly. Jeff Dean would be a canonical example of a Vice President equivalent level, however Jeff Dean also ended up being a manager/organizational head of the Research Product Area for several years as a Fellow. Vint Cerf may be another useful example of a Fellow / Vice President equivalent.
(My statements here are from having personally done statistical analysis of career ladders and levels at Google and Alphabet as a whole)
The technical/individual contributor track also has L8 and L9 Director/Senior Director levels. Sometimes it's referred to as a "Principal" level in Product Areas like Cloud, but there are far fewer L8+ people on individual contributor career ladders (i.e. tracks) than on management ladders.
L8 is considered the start of Google's "executive levels," where individuals at this level and above are privy to executive-level training, perks, etc.
Google Fellows are generally L10 (i.e. Vice President equivalent level), if I recall correctly. Jeff Dean would be a canonical example of a Vice President equivalent level, however Jeff Dean also ended up being a manager/organizational head of the Research Product Area for several years as a Fellow. Vint Cerf may be another useful example of a Fellow / Vice President equivalent.
(My statements here are from having personally done statistical analysis of career ladders and levels at Google and Alphabet as a whole)