Plenty pay >$250k remotely and in large cities such as SF and NYC-- For Engineers, Managers/Executives (Eng, Mktg, other), Salespeople, etc. You just have to ask for it. If you're unfamiliar, join TeamBlind.com
A company sent me roles at $125k recently. I wrote them back with a polite variation of "heck no, my rate is $250k".
I'm currently quite broke-- $5k to my name (too many sabbaticals, plus only recently paid off student debt and pivoted into engineering). But I bluff every time and sometimes it works out. Nothing to lose: there seem to be infinite employers in need of software engineers.
Excluding finance, there's Spotify, Doordash, Salesforce, Square, Twitter (incl. remote), Coinbase (remote), Palantir, Roku, Affirm, Robinhood... and that's just the publicly-traded companies that explicitly have offices in New York. You have even more options looking at companies that are either remote-friendly, or are late-stage startups with competitive equity grants (i.e. Stripe, Instacart, etc), or both (there's a lot of overlap between those two categories).
Does Amazon actually pay $250k. I heard from someone who works there that the salary ceiling for all engineers is $150k and the rest is compensation. Is this true?
Yes, there is a base cap of $160K ($185K for HCOL areas like NY and Bay Area), and the rest of the compensation is RSUs. For engineers who are senior and above, RSU based compensation will usually be more than 50% of their overall compensation.
