Member Article

Hired Report on UK Engineer Salaries

Hired, the company on a mission to get everyone a job they love, has tapped into its data to reveal insights on tech worker’s salaries and the hiring market more generally. Because Hired facilitates the job searching process from the initial interview request all the way to the final job offer, we have unprecedented visibility into salaries across a variety of positions and companies. Most of the tools available to companies and jobseekers are flawed and inaccurate. Salary calculators don’t account for company size, years of candidate experience or location, while many job sites are based on anonymous, self-reported data which can vary widely in accuracy. Hired’s data, on the other hand, is based on actual job offers made to real people. Our inaugural State of Salaries report is part of a larger effort to bring more transparency to the hiring process. We want to empower candidates to understand their market value based on their skills and experience so that they can approach the job searching process armed with information. We also want to help companies recruit and hire with insight. We believe this transparency benefits everyone, so that individuals can find jobs they love and companies can attract the individuals who will drive their businesses forward.

With a string of high profile exits and an influx of venture capital investment, London’s importance as a global tech hub is growing quickly. As the tech community grows and more traditional businesses begin to embrace the digital world, the demand for technical skillsets is increasing. However, despite this growing demand for tech talent, Hired’s data indicates that salaries in London for software engineers hasn’t kept pace with other world-class tech centers such as San Francisco and New York. In fact, when compared to these two cities, UK companies actually offer the lowest average salaries for software engineers. When adjusted for cost of living, an engineer earning an average salary in San Francisco would make the equivalent of £86,000 a year, while an engineer earning an average salary in New York would make an equivalent of £81,000. Compared with London, where the average developer salary is £54,000 a year, San Francisco and New York salaries are 37 percent higher and 33 percent higher respectively.

As you would expect, developers’ salaries increase relative to their experience overall, although this does depend on the size of the company, their funding status and hence, ability to pay market rate. Junior developers with a year or less of work experience can expect to make an average of £39,000, whereas a mid-level engineer with 2 - 4 years of experience can expect a salary of £48,000 on average. Senior developers and engineering managers with 6+ years of experience can command upwards of £60,000 although this can range up to £110,000 at larger businesses or for the most senior roles. CTOs and engineering leads may be looking for even higher salaries than this but, especially in early stage startups where they may be founders in business, this may be tempered by a larger equity stake in the business.

The report reveals that although London businesses are hiring great talent in the UK, they are also very willing to recruit from across Europe too. Twenty-eight percent of UK placements were from other parts of Europe or in the US, with San Franciscobased candidates receiving the highest number of offers from London companies. European candidates were drawn primarily from Spain, Sweden, and France.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Oliver .