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What Are Silicon Valley's Highest-Paying Tech Jobs? (ieee.org)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the growing-demand dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Job-search site Indeed crunched its Silicon Valley hiring numbers for 2018, looking at tech job searches, salaries, and employers, and found that engineers who combine tech skills with business skills as directors of product management earn the most, with an average salary of US $186,766. Last year, the gig came in as number two, at $173,556. Also climbing up the ranks, and now in the number two spot with an average annual salary of $181,100, is senior reliability engineer. Application security engineer is third at $173,903. Neither made the top 20 in 2017. And while it seems that machine learning engineers have been getting all the love in 2018, those jobs came in eighth place, at $159,230. That's still a bit of a leap from last year, when the job made its first appearance on Indeed's top 20 highest-paying jobs in the 13th spot at $149,519. This year's top 20 is below; last year's numbers are here. Further reading: 'Blockchain Developer' is the Fastest-Growing US Job (LinkedIn study).

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Should have gone into music by Crashmarik · · Score: 2, Interesting

    https://www.mercurynews.com/20...

    San Francisco Orchestra Minimum Salary 141K average 171K

  2. Sales Engineer = $250K by they_call_me_quag · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The author of this "study" is correct in saying that "engineers who combine tech skills with business skills ... earn the most" but they are incorrect in placing product management at the top of their list.

    An experienced enterprise sales engineer at a company like Salesforce or Oracle can pull in $250,000 a year. And unlike a "director product management," a sales engineer at that pay level is not a manager; one can hit this level of pay without having any headcount.

    Why are sales engineers paid so well? Three reasons:

    (1) Limited supply. Finding people with the rare mix of technical and interpersonal skills is difficult and big companies need a lot of sales engineers.

    (2) Revenue generation. Unlike product management, sales engineers are on the front line of the revenue generation process. Lose all of your product managers and your sales team can keep functioning for a year or so. Lose all of your sales engineers and the revenue engine seizes up immediately.

    (3) Sales culture. Big companies throw huge amounts of money at their sales executives. The top salespeople at places like Salesforce and Oracle bring in over $1M per year. Paying the top sales engineers $250K is a relative bargain.