You can still earn a salary of $250ki crypto in 2023 as an engineer

2021 and early 2022 was a very profitable time to be a crypto or blockchain engineer. Since then, expectations have been much murkier. But if you look in the right places, the compensation in crypto is still, by and large, quite tempting.

While previously massive firms like Coinbase and Kraken were the places to look for pay, it’s the smaller crypto firms that are now the most generous.

Rob Paone, CEO of crypto-recruiting firm Proof of Talent, says that “there are a lot of smaller companies that are hiring for just a few roles.”

Often these roles are as basic engineers, and this is where the salaries are highest. “We recently placed a basic engineer at a company with a salary of $250,” says Paone. “They will then earn anywhere between 1% and 3% equity plus tokens depending on what the company does.

However, unless you’ve already worked with crypto, breaking in can be a challenge. Paone says “a lot of the placements we’ve done recently have been from one crypto firm to another, as there’s been a lot of turnover in the industry.”

The general profile of the candidate appears more specialized. Paone says “there’s been super high demand for cryptonative roles and solidity developers,” and the people they’re looking at are “highly advanced engineers and cryptographers, going as far as PhDs in cryptography.”

Paone says that people specialized in ZK-STARK (blockchain information security technology), “Really hard engineering research” and blockchain scaling projects like upbeat rollups are especially in demand.

Some of these can still make serious money at the big firms too. This February on Levels.fyi, a security engineer at Coinbase reported a base salary of $237,000 and a 7th level front-end engineer with 12 years of experience said he/she made $920,000 (salary alone is only 278.5k dollars)

This does not mean that all salaries in the big companies are going strong. Last November, we reported that an engineering manager at Gemini in New York could earn a salary between $227k and $318k; their highest salary range now is $198k to $277k.

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