How much I made as a really good Engineer at Facebook

When I moved to US to join Facebook a decade back, I had no idea whether the offer I was given was good or bad. I actually didn’t even negotiate and accepted whatever number they gave me. It was partially because I was so excited just to be given an offer and partially because I had no idea what was expected. Facebook to their credit ended up giving me 7–8% higher than what they had initially offered (I am assuming because they were holding something in buffer expecting me to negotiate — which I didn’t).

Fortunately over the last few years, because of glassdoor, levels.fyi and other similar websites, it has become really easy to find what is average and the range. One thing which is still lacking is how much you can make if you are really good — think top 1% of all engineers at FB (~100 engineers at FB). In this post, I will share my compensation and career progression over the years which hopefully will give you an idea of how fast you can grow and compensation if you continue to do really well.

Quick Note: The values below are based on zero stock appreciation i.e. if I was given a grant at $50 share price and it is now vesting at $200, I am still using $50 to calculate the values below because this is what FB was actually paying me and the appreciation was the reward for the risk I took.

I will talk about how I progressed in career and compensation I received each year below but if you are here just for the numbers, here you go:

Here is a brief version of how I got to E8 and my compensation over the years. TLDR in the end in case you want to skip.

Year 1:

I started at FB as E4 with base salary of $127k and starting grant worth $280k. Facebook was trying out lot of new products and there was lot of low hanging fruit across the company. The first half was mainly operating as solo engineer who can build a production ready prototype really quickly and I launched 3 new large features/small products. In second half, on one of the important products in our area, all 3 seniors engineers who were working on it changed teams. I stepped up and told my manager I will take care of this. Given the importance of the product, within 6 months, the team was back to 4 engineers and since I was the first one, I became…