Counted October 17, 2026 · from employers’ own postings
Backend Software Engineer: $188K median posted pay.
From 43 salary bands employers posted on 86 open backend software engineer roles in software engineering. Never an estimate.
The ladder, by level
What each rung pays.
| Level | Open roles | Median posted band | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior | 37 | $194K | — |
| Staff | 11 | — (7 of 8 bands) | — |
| Principal | 1 | — (1 of 8 bands) | — |
Levels as the postings name them. A rung shows a median only where eight or more postings at that level carried a band.
Who is hiring
The employers with the most open.
| Employer | Open roles | Entry level |
|---|---|---|
| Palantir Technologies | 13 | — |
| OpenAI | 5 | — |
| sentinellabs | 4 | — |
| Esri | 3 | — |
| tripactions | 3 | — |
| Nightfall AI | 2 | — |
| Nebius | 2 | — |
| FleetWorks | 2 | — |
| Asana | 2 | — |
| Tennr | 2 | — |
Counted from employers’ own job boards. The ten with the most open backend software engineer roles tonight.
The skills, as the postings name them
What these postings ask for.
| Skill | Postings | At entry |
|---|---|---|
| Software Engineering | 86 | — |
| Python | 40 | — |
| Cloud Infrastructure | 37 | — |
| Observability | 36 | — |
| Go | 31 | — |
| Kubernetes | 27 | — |
| SQL | 26 | — |
| Java | 26 | — |
| Machine Learning | 23 | — |
| Microservices | 22 | — |
Where the work is
20% of these roles are remote.
- Remote20%17 roles
- Hybrid23%20 roles
- On site50%43 roles
- Not stated7%6 roles
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How this was counted
Every figure is counted from 86 open postings read from employers’ own job boards on October 17, 2026, and recounted every night. Pay is the band the employer posted — never an estimate, never a model — and 43 of these postings carried one. Titles are grouped by the words the postings use, with levels, shifts and schedules removed, so “Senior Backend Software Engineer (Nights)” counts here too. 100% of roles with this title sit in software engineering, which is why this page belongs to that career. A title gets a page only where twenty-five or more roles are open, eight or more of them posted a band, three or more employers are hiring for it and four in five of its postings sit in one career, so no page here is a guess.