Hey guys, Please help me decide between an offer and career path. I’m currently a data scientist with a background in CS and I want to get more involved in engineering. I’ve been mostly applying for data engineer and swe roles and to my surprise, I have 2 offers! These are just initial numbers and I haven’t negotiated between the two. Data Engineer at a series E unicorn startup Base: 170k Sign-on bonus: 5k Equity: $4k per year Total TC: 178k Pros: fully remote, only 1 other DE engineer but rapidly expanding so lots of opportunities for growth, can be promoted to Senior within 3-6 months if meets expectations, cool hiring manager, work doesn’t seem technically challenging Cons: startup and small team so I expect work to be fast paced Software Engineer II at Qualtrics Base: 145k RSU grant: 72k Sign on bonus: 15k Total TC: 239k Pros: more money, engineers there seem pretty happy, very kind and collaborative interview experience Cons: imposter syndrome, unsure what team I’ll be on, never worked as a swe in a big company before so harder ramp-up, RTO one day Writing this out, it seems like a no-brainer to go to Qualtrics and get that software engineer money but I’m hoping for some guidance. Has anybody else made the switch from DS to SWE before? How did it go and what can I do as an engineer to keep growing? Also do you think I can negotiate more base or RSUs from Qualtrics using my other offer? How is Qualtrics as my first company to start my swe career? Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks! TC: 150k YOE: 5 HCOL (Bay Area or seattle) #offer #negotiate #negotiateoffer #dataengineer #swe #rsu
Can you negotiate more for qualtrics?
Qualtrics is great to work at!! Definitely love it here. My buddy just switched over from STE II to SDE II and is doing fine. I imagine the same will be the case for you
Thanks for the response! That’s very encouraging. What do you think of this offer?
I think it’s solid. You could try to negotiate if you wanted, never hurts, but even if they don’t budge I’d take it
How did you prep for DE coming from DS? How long?
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Equity sounds way too low for the startup. It should be at-least $40-50k ish per year if you are jr engineer. Also, $178k at a lcol/mcol area will go much further than $239k in a hcol area. Do include location in your post.
Yeah, Qualtrics is in seattle but I’m looking to move there soon. Updated my post with location - all HCOL
Got it. Is the series E startup Deliverr by chance? If yes, DM me if you are not comfortable sharing it publicly as I have an offer from there. As a data engineer, what kind of work would you do? Will it involve working on spark, building some backend services to provide data as as service? Will you be working on streaming applications? If that is the case, you will get a ton of exposure to distributed systems. You can always represent your position as Software Engineer - data on your resume if you want to explore swe roles later. Additionally, you will most likely get more exposure to building high throughput distributed systems as a data engineer at the startup and actually learn how to scale them. If it is a typical sql role though, I would not even bother. However, that equity portion needs to go up a lot to even consider the startup offer.