This may be unconventional advice, but with your level of experience, I say don't try to maximize compensation right now. Instead, look to find the best experie

This may be unconventional advice, but with your level of experience, I say don't try to maximize compensation right now. Instead, look to find the best experience possible so you can have the best narrative possible when you've got 5-7 years experience. At your level, my guess is you'd top out at around $90k/yr if you bargained hard. Senior and Staff engineers can easily make twice that, especially when you find a situation with decent equity. So figure out the shortest path to get to those senior levels so you can start interviewing for those jobs as soon as possible. As a hiring manager, I've interviewed people who have 5 great years of experience who I'm very comfortable hiring into those senior roles. And I've also interviewed people who have 15 years on paper but when you dig into it, it's the same one year of experience 15 times over. They're an easy pass from a hiring standpoint. Not everyone looks at candidates the way that I do, but it's still extremely common for some people to move up much faster than others. Anything you can do to be one of the group that moves up quickly will make you more money in the long run. Things you can be looking for right now instead of money: - Try to find a team where you're the weakest member. It may be scary, but you learn from working with talented engineers and if you're the strongest member of the team, you'll stagnate. - If you've got more than 18 months in a position and you feel you're not learning something important, jump to a new position. Diversity of experience is usually better than a single, longer experience even if it's good experience. - As much as it gets trashed around here, chase the latest buzzword technologies. The more technologies you can prove you know, the more you can prove your ability to learn and the more money you're likely to get offered. - A chance to take on responsibility beyond your years. If someone is willing to offer you a senior title with senior responsibilities but only pay you a junior salary, that's worth something. The next time you jump, you'll be able to jump into a senior-paid role. The advice changes once you get through your rapid advancement years, but for someone just starting out, I think the above is pretty solid. Focus on growing yourself...the money will follow.