Which companies offer highest salaries to software engineers ?

Engineers at a chip design company in HCMC. Photo VnExpress/by Quynh Tran

Many software engineers at OpenAI in the U.S. are paid nearly US$1 million a year, double the salary offered by other well-known tech companies.

According to Levels.fyi, a company which compiles data about the salaries and bonuses of tech workers, engineers in companies it surveyed received an average of $308,000 last year, up 2% from the $301,000 they got in 2022.

It also found OpenAI paid the highest, of $925,000 a year for engineers at level L5, which is near the top of its ranking scale. The pay includes basic salary, stocks and bonuses.

This was 50% higher than salaries at second ranked company Coupang ($600,000) and Clubhouse ($566,000).

The 16 highest paying companies for expert-level software engineers were mostly in finance or fintech such as Coinbase, Stripe and Hudson River Trading.

U.S. companies that pay the top salaries to software engineers. Photo by Levels.fyi

Tech giants such as Meta, Google and Apple are no longer in the top 10.

But in terms of salaries for software engineers at the highest level (principal engineer and above), Facebook was the leader, paying over $1.4 million.

Google paid $1.25 million and LinkedIn came in at $1.08 million.

According to Dice, a leading career marketplace for the U.S. tech industry, the fact that OpenAI engineers have high incomes is no surprise since the company created ChatGPT and is an important partner of Microsoft.

Its payroll comprises less than 1,000 people while big tech companies have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people.

The jobs at OpenAI need highly specialized skills and so workers would demand more, it said, pointing out high salaries are also insurance against its experts being lured away by competitors like Google.

The highest paying jobs in this field are leadership positions — CEO, CIO, CTO – and for people who implement large projects, such as solution architects, analysts and principal engineers.

But the survey also found that 35% of industry professionals were dissatisfied with their salaries in 2023, up from 30% in 2022.

In Singapore, the best paying companies are Coinbase ($248,000), Facebook ($182,000), and Apple ($159,000).