Stripe has lost its edge for engineering pay, unless you're a manager
If you want a top paying role in fintech, chances are you want to be a software engineer at Stripe. But are its days as a top paying fintech coming to an end?
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Levels.fyi has released its annual compensation report. Last year's report saw Stripe rank in the top 5 for staff engineer pay, and ranked 2nd for pay for its elite principal engineers. Now, however, it's fallen out of the rankings entirely for both seniority levels.
Stripe's principal engineers earned $940.7k on average in 2023. By falling out of Levels' top 7, the implication is that pay is now lower than the $728k average of 7th ranked Google in 2024. A minimum 22.6% drop.
We noticed that Stripe's overall engineering compensation had fallen by ~7% on Levels back in October. Levels' rankings suggest that this fall in pay has been aimed predominantly at its most senior engineers.
Stripe's engineering managers won't be feeling this burn. According to levels, they are the fifth highest paid engineering managers in the world, with a median average of $681.5k. The firms above them in this category were, in order, Netflix, Snowflake, Facebook and Databricks.
Reviews on jobs forum Blind suggest that the top paid people at Stripe are those that "joined earlier", and that pay "stagnates" for more recent hires. The fall in average pay may reflect that those incumbent top engineers have been leaving for places like OpenAI.
Reviews also note that the fintech his hiring "better leaders," and has a "great engineering culture," so those engineering managers seem to be earning their keep.
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