The 50 highest-paying companies for software engineers

Twenty U.S. companies pay their software engineers a median compensation of at least $400,000, five pay out at least half a million dollars and OpenAI, the fast-growing artificial-intelligence startup behind ChatGPT, pays nearly $1 million.

That's according to Levels.fyi, a site that tracks total compensation for a variety of tech roles. The numbers show just how lucrative engineering jobs can be at some of the country's top tech firms as companies compete for talent, even in a down market.

Levels.fyi combines a company's base salary, stock awards and bonuses to tally its compensation ranking. Compensation figures are based on self-reported offer letters from Levels.fyi users.

At the median, OpenAI, which is led by Sam Altman, pays its software engineers $925,000 in total compensation, according to Levels.fyi. That amount combines $300,000 in salary and $625,000 in stock-based compensation for employees at the median.

The sum is almost $300,000 more than the reported median compensation at hedge fund PDT Partners, which ranks second on Levels.fyi's list, at $650,000.

Coming in third, at $566,000, is Clubhouse, the pandemic-era breakout startup that's since seen its growth come back down to earth.

Entertainment giant Netflix, self-driving car firm Cruise and cloud company Snowflake also rank among Levels.fyi's top 10 firms for software engineers, each paying more than $470,000 in total compensation.

Other places engineers can earn a pay package of at least $400,000 include Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Stubhub and Roblox, according to Levels.fyi.

OpenAI's spot atop Levels.fyi's list of best-paying firms for software engineers shows how in-demand AI jobs are in today's market. Increasingly, companies are looking to hire "prompt engineers," the term for workers who can use generative AI services like ChatGPT to produce usable information.

An AI prompt manager position at government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton that was listed earlier this year on Indeed.com included a salary range of $93,000 to $212,000 a year.

Netflix recently posted a job for an AI expert that would pay upwards of $900,000 per year.

Lucrative AI jobs are, perhaps not surprisingly, located primarily in the Bay Area. San Francisco and San Jose accounted for one-quarter of all U.S. AI companies in 2021, according to research from The Brookings Institution, which as part of its research called for more efforts nationally to make sure AI jobs aren't clustered in the Bay Area and only a handful of other cities.

Salaries for other tech jobs

Levels.fyi's research also offers compensation figures for other tech jobs at U.S. companies. Here are the five highest-paying companies for product manager, data scientist and product designer jobs in terms of median total compensation, according to Levels.fyi:

Product manager

Data scientist

Product designer