2023 H1 Global Software Engineer Salary Report: Trends, Rankings, and Insights
The 2023 first‑half global software engineer salary report from Levels.fyi reveals overall salary growth, highlights significant increases for engineering managers and specialized fields like AR/VR, notes declines for certain roles such as blockchain engineers, and ranks companies across junior, mid‑level, senior, and principal positions, including a standout rise for OpenAI.
Levels.fyi released its 2023 H1 global software engineer salary report, analyzing total compensation (salary, stock, bonus) across more than 1,000 data points in over 1,500 cities.
The report classifies engineers into five levels—junior, mid‑level, senior, staff, and principal—and shows that overall salary growth is significant, especially for software engineering managers (5% increase) and technical project managers (4.8% increase).
However, not all roles saw raises: the median total compensation for software engineers remained flat at $170k, sales roles fell 0.3%, and areas such as security, production, SRE, and iOS saw only minor changes or slight declines. Notably, blockchain engineers experienced a sharp -11.3% drop.
In specialized fields, software engineers in AR/VR saw a 14.5% median compensation increase, while those in backend, DevOps, full‑stack, ML/AI, and mobile (iOS + Android) also enjoyed steady growth.
Junior engineer rankings place Databricks at the top with a median total compensation of $274.2k, followed by Flexport and Snowflake (~$225k). Other notable companies include LinkedIn, Waymo, Cruise, and Stripe. Overall, junior engineers still earn above $210k on average, though total compensation has slipped compared to the previous year.
Mid‑level engineers see Databricks leading again with $385.85k, down from $443k in 2022. Video game platform ROBLOX rose to $370k, securing second place.
Senior engineer rankings list Databricks, Netflix, and ROBLOX as the top three, with Netflix moving from third to second ($550k) and ROBLOX climbing from unranked to second.
Principal (staff) engineer rankings highlight OpenAI at the top with a remarkable $925k median total compensation, a dramatic rise from being unranked last year. This compensation comprises $300k base salary plus $625k in equity, paid over a four‑year cycle.
Overall, principal engineers now see median total compensation above $660k, a substantial increase from the prior year.
Additional visual data includes charts for senior and principal engineer compensation trends.
For further details, readers are encouraged to view the original article.
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