Counted October 17, 2026 · from employers’ own postings
Software Engineer: $201K median posted pay.
From 4,408 salary bands employers posted on 8,277 open 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 | 3,145 | $198K | — |
| Staff | 1,209 | $234K | — |
| Principal | 638 | $251K | — |
| Mid | 255 | $144K | — |
| Intern | 85 | $100K | — |
| Junior | 41 | $105K | — |
| Management | 9 | — (2 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Anduril Industries | 213 | — |
| Cisco | 195 | — |
| SpaceX | 174 | — |
| Databricks | 143 | — |
| NVIDIA | 140 | — |
| Elastic | 114 | — |
| OpenAI | 112 | — |
| Affirm | 105 | — |
| roblox | 101 | — |
| ServiceNow | 98 | — |
Counted from employers’ own job boards. The ten with the most open software engineer roles tonight.
The skills, as the postings name them
What these postings ask for.
| Skill | Postings | At entry |
|---|---|---|
| Software Engineering | 8,228 | — |
| Python | 3,747 | — |
| Cloud Infrastructure | 3,390 | — |
| CI/CD | 2,580 | — |
| Java | 2,516 | — |
| Observability | 2,510 | — |
| Kubernetes | 2,476 | — |
| SQL | 2,345 | — |
| TypeScript | 2,194 | — |
| C | 2,186 | — |
Where the work is
15% of these roles are remote.
- Remote15%1,218 roles
- Hybrid12%987 roles
- On site65%5,368 roles
- Not stated9%704 roles
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How this was counted
Every figure is counted from 8,277 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 4,408 of these postings carried one. Titles are grouped by the words the postings use, with levels, shifts and schedules removed, so “Senior 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.