at a fintech, not a hedge fund

The consensus among financial technologists is that if you want incredible salaries, hedge funds are the best destination. This is mostly true, but a fintech in particular provides a compensation package that cannot be ignored, and it only gets better the more senior you get.

The fintech is the payment provider Stripe. The California-based decacorn almost became a centacorn in 2021 with a value of $95 billion, but has since reportedly dropped its internal valuation since then. This does not mean that the employees are suffering, in fact quite far from it according to Levels.fyi’s annual salary report for 2022.

At the entry level, one hedge fund reigned supreme over all companies in the tiers FYI report: quant hedge fund Two Sigma. There, engineers earned an average total compensation (TC) of $274k compared to runner-up Stripe’s $266k.

At higher levels, however, Stripe pays more.

Engineers at Stripe with 5+ years of experience are ranked 4th^th across all industries for TC, earns $488,000, while no hedge fund even makes the ranking for experienced employees. Five years into a tech career, Levels fyi says the highest payers are Databricks, Cruise and Netflix

When job titles rather than experience are taken into account, Stripe’s engineers are some of the highest paid. Stripe’s staff engineers earn the most of staff engineers at all reported companies, earning $688k while lead engineers come in second to Facebook with a staggering $900k TC package.

Another fintech that pays well at the senior level is Coinbase. The crypto titan comes in second behind Stripe for Staff engineering pay and is one spot behind when it comes to paying software engineers. Coinbase is the highest paying financial company for product designers, where you can earn $330ki TC.

Making the most money isn’t just about where you are, it’s also what you do. Levels.fyi co-founder Zuhayeer Musa says that “Hedge funds and high-frequency trading firms are absolutely the best paying companies, especially for quantitative developer roles.”

Stripe and Two Sigma’s explicit leveling structure allowed the site to publish their data more reliably, but Musa insists that at other hedge funds, “new grads can manage $400k USD in total compensation with their bonuses.”

Firms mentioned by Musa are Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, PDT Partners and IMC Trading. At Hudson River for example, an October graduate reported a TC of $500k at levels for a machine learning and artificial intelligence developer position.

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