Main image of article What Do Fintech Firms Such as Coinbase Pay Their Software Engineers?

Over the past few years, the fintech industry has attracted technologists interested in not only finance and cryptocurrency, but also cybersecurity, cloud and other disciplines. As an industry, fintech is all about money—but how much does it actually pay software engineers, particularly those just starting out?

For an answer, we can turn to levels.fyi, which crowdsources compensation information for software engineers in multiple industries. While crowdsourcing isn’t always the most exact way of determining accurate salary numbers, we’re inclined to trust levels.fyi’s ranges because they tend to align with other sources, such as Glassdoor.

In any case, this is how much entry-level software engineers may earn at some of fintech’s most prominent companies:

Fintech, in other words, can pay a software engineer a very solid salary—roughly equivalent to what they’d earn at Big Tech companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. When it comes to the overall compensation package, the biggest question is stock: If any of these fintech companies succeed wildly on the public markets, it could easily send their employees’ skyrocketing to the moon. But if the stock fails to rise, it’ll dampen those technologists’ take-home.

That’s a risk familiar to technologists who don’t work in fintech, of course; there’s always the chance your startup could go down in flames before an acquisition or IPO. Even at larger companies, a stock crash can dampen your compensation in unexpected ways—for instance, technologists at Meta are reportedly grumbling about how the giant’s shrinking share-price has put their options underwater.

For those technologists comfortable with the risk, however, fintech provides some tantalizing opportunities. From a business perspective, there’s always the potential for a big company to swoop in and acquire your scrappy startup (Apple just paid an undisclosed sum for Credit Kudos, for instance). Fintech technologists also work on some very cutting-edge problems in “hot” arenas such as cryptocurrency and cybersecurity—potentially tantalizing, no matter how much money is at stake.