A note on sourcing, because it matters: these are not our own placement records. They come from offers our candidates have shown us during live searches this year, compensation data our founders carried in from prior roles, and public filings, all cross-checked against each other. Where the sample was too thin to be honest, we say so instead of publishing a number.
The headline: senior compensation kept climbing, but unevenly. The biggest premiums went to engineers who pair depth in one area with genuine end-to-end range, and to anyone who has shipped an LLM feature to production. That last group commanded 15–25% over otherwise-identical peers, and the gap widened over the year.
Ranges we are seeing for permanent US roles: Senior Backend $175–215k base, Staff $210–260k, Platform/SRE $180–225k, ML/AI Engineers $195–270k with the top of band reserved for hands-on RAG and eval experience. Senior Product Designers $150–185k. Equity varied too much to average honestly, so we haven't.
Contract rates ran $85–130/hr for senior engineers, with AI-adjacent work at $110–150/hr. Contract-to-hire conversions typically landed 5 to 8% below the market permanent rate, the trade for reduced risk on both sides.
Two things stand out. First, remote roles no longer carry a discount. The 2023-era 'remote adjustment' has effectively disappeared from the offers we see. Second, counter-offers are aggressive again: candidates should assume one is coming and decide in advance what answer they want to give. Plan your close accordingly.
One caution on reading any salary guide, including this one: ranges describe markets, not people. Someone demonstrably stronger than the band should be paid above it, and a lower number is sometimes the right call for a team that will compound a career. The range is where the conversation starts, not where it ends.
If you want a benchmark for a specific role, stack, and city, we'll put a tailored one together from live data in about a day, at no charge and no strings. It's the fastest way to find out if we're useful.
