The estimated salary for an entry-level software engineer is $96,716 per year in Silicon Valley, CA. Salaries for software engineers vary widely, from the lower end to the top earners. An additional bonus is often part of the compensation package.
Salary Ranges and Influencing Factors
Software engineers on the lower end make roughly $73,000 a year, while the top 10% make $136,000. The average compensation for a software engineer is $173K annually, plus an additional bonus of $7.7K. As of 2023, the starting salary in Silicon Valley for startups is around $84,987 per year.
Scala is the best-paying skill for software engineers, with 24% more than the average base salary of $101,876 per year. Several factors influence average salaries in Silicon Valley.
Salaries by Location and Experience
Highest-Paying Cities
According to Indeed, the highest-paying cities in Silicon Valley are:
- Redwood City: $171,713
- Sunnyvale: $167,623
- Palo Alto: $164,081
These cities are home to major tech companies like Apple, Box, Electronic Arts, Evernote, Facebook, Google, Informatica, Logitech, Oracle, PayPal, and more.
Experience-Based Pay
The average engineer salary also varies by years of experience:
- Less than 1 year: $109,622
With Silicon Valley’s high cost of living, annual salaries like $120,000 may not stretch very far. Nonetheless, specialized positions, such as platform engineers and senior software architects, have higher average earnings, reflected in salary and hourly rates.
Note: In the processed text, similar and redundant sentences were removed as per requirement (a), titles were added and formatted with Markdown (c), and a list format was used for structuring cities (d). The rest of the text remains unchanged (e).