# Salary model v2: method (24 October 2026)

**Layout:**

- **Main view:** pick a city and a specialism, and see salaries for every seniority level.
- **"What moves this number":** a section underneath showing how funding stage and company type change the figures, with equity and bonus guidance.

Real advert data is shown wherever there are at least 10 matching adverts. Everywhere else the guide shows these modelled figures, clearly labelled.

## Baseline: a venture-backed startup, growth stage (Series A/B)

**New York and San Francisco:**

- Built from 1,046 advertised ranges at 220 startups (collected 24 Oct 2026), excluding:
  - frontier labs;
  - big tech;
  - public companies.
- Senior software engineer: New York about $207k, San Francisco about $209k.
- Level ratios, relative to Senior, are taken from the same data:

| Level | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| Mid | 0.88 |
| Staff/Principal | 1.19 |
| Lead/Head of | 1.09 |
| Founding (base) | 0.93 |

**London:**

- Anchored on Ravio's published UK startup benchmarks for Software Engineers at growth stage: mid-level (P3) £68,500, senior (M3) £111,600. Source: ravio.com/blog/startup-salaries, 13 Nov 2025, from the Ravio 2026 Compensation Trends report.
- Staff, Lead and Founding use the same ratios to Senior as the US.
- **Premium positioning (24 Oct):** Corellia's market is premium, well-funded startups and scaleups, so London figures are set 15% above Ravio's all-startup median, which is roughly its 75th percentile. Senior software engineer at Series A/B: about £128k. Mid-level: about £79k.
- Cross-check: real London adverts from premium startups support this level. Monzo's median is about £132k, incident.io about £155k, Attio about £135k and Granola about £115k (mixed levels).
- New York and San Francisco need no uplift. Those adverts already come from well-funded, mostly top-tier-backed startups.

## Specialism uplifts (on software engineering)

| Specialism | Uplift | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| AI & machine learning | +8% | Our adverts show +4% to +12% depending on level. Published 2026 benchmarks cite a 12 to 15% AI/ML premium. |
| Research | +25% | Real adverts outside the frontier labs: $283k vs $224k median. Matches our founder’s recruitment experience before Corellia Talent. |
| Technical leadership | +16% | Our adverts. |

## Funding stage (applied to base salary; the baseline is Series A/B)

| Stage | Mid | Senior and above |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed | 0.88 | 0.80 |
| Seed | 0.92 | 0.86 |
| Series A | 0.97 | 0.96 |
| Series B | 1.02 | 1.03 |
| Series C+ | 1.04 | 1.07 |

**Why this shape:**

- Ravio's UK data shows early stage (pre-seed and seed) paying about 8% less than growth stage for mid-level, and about 15% less for senior.
- It shows late stage paying 6% more (mid) and 11% more (senior) than growth stage.
- Our founder’s placement experience before Corellia Talent is that base salary flattens after Series B, and later-stage companies add cash bonuses instead. The late-stage uplift on base is therefore kept modest.
- Our own adverts are too thin at Seed and Series A (fewer than 30) to set the shape.

## Company type

- **Frontier lab or AI-native:** multiply by 1.35.
  - In our US adverts, frontier and AI-native companies paid 28% to 48% more than other startups for the same specialism and level.
  - Examples: Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Harvey, Scale, Decagon, Sierra, Suno, Figure, Together, Modal, Baseten, Mercor, Cohere, Character.
- **Early-stage frontier research companies:** treated as frontier, based on our founder’s recruitment experience before Corellia Talent. They rarely publish salary ranges, so none are in our adverts.
- **London:** frontier pay may sit above this. Anthropic's London research adverts sit far higher.

## Range

The p25 to p75 range is the median ±13%, which is the typical spread of real adverts around the model.

## Equity and bonus guidance

Shown as guidance, not as data:

- **Equity:** the first engineering hire typically gets about 1% (Carta, via Mucker). Pave puts a senior founding engineer at 0.33% (median), 0.62% (75th percentile) and 1.24% (90th percentile). Grants fall sharply after the first few hires and at each later stage.
- **Bonus:** rare at pre-seed and seed. Increasingly common from Series C, which is how late-stage cash keeps rising after base flattens (our founder’s recruitment experience before Corellia Talent).

## Limits

- The US gap between Mid and Senior is much smaller than in the UK data. The reasons:
  - US "Mid" here is untitled engineers at well-funded startups;
  - Ravio's mid-level (P3) band sits lower.
- The baseline is well-funded, venture-backed companies.
- Rebuild monthly as new data and "Share your package" submissions arrive.

## Files

- `modelled_estimates_v2_2026-10-24.csv`: 612 rows covering city × specialism × level × stage (All stages, Pre-seed to Series C+) × company type, with p25, median and p75.
- `corellia-salary-adverts-2026-10-24.csv`: the 3,924 source adverts.