In Silicon Valley, Salaries For Engineers Are Starting At $165,000

Talented tech folks in Silicon Valley have always been paid huge salaries, but even so 2013 is shaping up to be a record-breaker, says recruiter Scott Purcell, division manager for Jobspring Silicon Valley.

For instance, Twitter's Christopher Fry, senior vice president of engineering raked in $10.3 million last year, mostly in stock awards, making his total pay second only to CEO Dick Costolo. Without the stock, Fry's base salary was $145,513 with a bonus of $100,000.

That base is not at all unusual.

A few months ago, Purcell wrote on his blog that Valley salaries for programmers have hit record-levels in 2013, with no end in sight:

For the first time since I've been recruiting I'm placing Senior Engineers at base salaries of 165k. You would think that these would be big, profitable companies, but the companies paying those salaries range from Series A funded startups to 300 person profitable startups.

This year alone I've placed entry-level grads starting at 80k and generated an offer for a Java Hadoop candidate with only three years of experience at 175k. Salaries for Senior Java Engineers that my team is placing range from 140k on the very low end to 165k. Candidates with 3-5 years of experience are easily being offered 110k-130k base salaries with significant equity and / or bonuses.

These salaries are even more impressive when compared to the national average. Valley programmers are making a good $50,000 - $77,000 more, just in their base, according to research sent to us from job site Indeed.com.

Here's the national average:

• Software Developer: $89,000
• Java Developer: $94,000
• Software Engineer: $94,000
• Senior Software Engineer: $98,000