Comp expectations for staff engineer at uber
I'm an IC 6 at Oracle, been here at that level for ~3.5 years, had joined through an acquisition . I had a really great onsite round recently and expecting an offer ... any guidelines on what to expect? I know there was a recent comp adjustment /rethink at Uber ... I'll appreciate any insights. Thanks!
Can you talk about base + equity ? TC of 350 seems quite low, at staff level ...
ZerO with big O
Can you share your IC6 compensation? IC6 is super rare at Oracle like less than 1%
Depends on stock performance ... but it ranges between 600k to 750k ... also right after acquisition 3 years ago, it was around 2M for 2 years
Wow 600k+ what a jump from average 200-250k for IC5(BMC salary is another story)
There are a lot of IC5s, very few IC6. From what I've heard, it takes 6-8 years to move from ic5 to ic6... also I'm the cto for a division - so I do think I'm a little underpaid for what I bring to the table here...
Depends on how you value pre-IPO equity, but 600-750k seems very high based on my experience. Also coming in as staff is relatively rare - expect to be leveled down - happens all the time. Honestly, if you’re pulling $1m ea for the last two years and that’s likely to continue, you should probably stay where you are.
Leveling down? Can you explain a bit? Does uber hire at a higher level and then reduce your level after 6-12 months? Isn't it same as putting you on pip ? Why would one stay after that? ( since you say - happens all the time!)
He means the level you will be offered. It is common amongst tech companies for software engineers (not hardware). For instance, Microsoft senior engineers would not easily move to Amazon as a senior engineer. It is common they become Software engineer 2 at Amazon. Same can happen to you. Don't know if Uber really does that though. Until I stopped the interview process, I was interviewing for one level up for Uber but the offer could be coming at for the same level. It can happen in the opposite way if you are coming from highly sought after companies for needed area. There was Facebook engineer posing his offer in blind. He was senior at Facebook but offered principal at Amazon with 600k total comp which beat his Google senior offer at 400k. But he could be a unique case as he said he is in a very specialized area where there are not many engineers with the skill.
Any real pointers?
So not sure how it is this after they changed comp around and all that. Not too long ago though it was Senior band (so L5A, there's a second L5B before L6 which is staff) would be 700k over 4yrs. Staff I would assume could push you to 1.2MM over 4 years possibly (I have no basis for this assumption btw), combine that with 200K salary (I'm L6 and that's my salary) you could probably hit 500K TC but to hit 600K you'd have to be pulling off 1.6MM of stock over 4yrs which would be very hard to pull off IMO. If the stock does well during/post IPO before lockup expires that 500K TC could easily reach 600K but yeah, still a bit of a reach. Honestly you may want to ask to come in at Senior Staff level if you're really looking for that kind of TC (even then that's a lot unless you're coming in from an acquisition) but then there's so few Senior Staff (less than 5 or so in the company) and I'm not even sure if they hire at that level. Hope that helps a little. Basically coming in from acquisitions will always be where you make the most $$ IMO. That or join company pre IPO and they really make a large magnitude increase in valuation before going public. FWIW there's about 40/50 Staff engineers right now in a 2.5k Eng org.
Fuck me, that's a lot of money. A guy I know from ms is now staff there. Never knew you guys are getting paid this much! How much of that goes towards taxes?
Yeah Silicon Valley + investors that froth at the mouth when they see a real unicorn = ability to hand out some pretty good paper money. Granted none of that is liquid right now and there's no super firm date on when the IPO would be, might still be years from now and all you have till then is salary. So.. there's that. You'll need a few competing offers to push to those levels of stock though too mind you. That's the only way to push up comp offers while interviewing. Uber is all RSUs these days so it's all taxed as income, so depending on what state you're in when it goes public could be in the 45-50% ballpark (I hear some parts of CA the top tax bracket is 52...). Some employees have started transferring to Seattle office to cut a good 7-12% off that because of the lack of state income tax.
This such a useful response, thanks! I’ll keep that in mind. Honestly, if uber comp taps out at 1.2 M in stock over 4 yrs, I think I’ll stay with oracle for a year more and keep looking for that next big thing.
Asked many times. The answer is always around three fiddy