Counted October 19, 2026 · from employers’ own postings
Founding Engineer: $185K median posted pay.
From 39 salary bands employers posted on 86 open founding engineer roles in software engineering. Never an estimate.
The ladder, by level
What each rung pays.
| Level | Open roles | Median posted band | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intern | 1 | — (0 of 8 bands) | — |
| Management | 1 | — (1 of 8 bands) | — |
| Senior | 1 | — (0 of 8 bands) | — |
| Staff | 1 | — (0 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Clera | 53 | — |
| EQL Tech | 2 | — |
| Founders Factory | 2 | — |
| MLabs | 2 | — |
| Freckle | 2 | — |
| Falconer | 1 | — |
| AngelList | 1 | — |
| Doji | 1 | — |
| BoltWise | 1 | — |
| Fleetline | 1 | — |
Counted from employers’ own job boards. The ten with the most open founding engineer roles tonight.
The skills, as the postings name them
What these postings ask for.
| Skill | Postings | At entry |
|---|---|---|
| TypeScript | 18 | — |
| React | 16 | — |
| Python | 13 | — |
| SQL | 13 | — |
| Software Engineering | 13 | — |
| Cloud Infrastructure | 11 | — |
| Agent Design | 10 | — |
| Machine Learning | 8 | — |
| Data Pipelines | 7 | — |
| Observability | 6 | — |
Where the work is
22% of these roles are remote.
- Remote22%19 roles
- Hybrid7%6 roles
- On site71%61 roles
- Not stated0%0 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 19, 2026, and recounted every night. Pay is the band the employer posted — never an estimate, never a model — and 39 of these postings carried one. Titles are grouped by the words the postings use, with levels, shifts and schedules removed, so “Senior Founding 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.