Founding engineer salary in 2026

Most salary numbers for founding engineers come from self-reported surveys or job posts. We used a source companies have to certify to the federal government: the Labor Condition Applications employers file with the Department of Labor when they hire someone on an H-1B visa. Each filing names the job title, the worksite and the wage the company commits to pay. We took every certified, full-time filing from fiscal 2024 and 2025 whose title includes “founding” and describes an engineering role. That came to 195 filings from 180 different employers, and we read the annual base wage on each.

The numbers

• All founding engineers. Median $161,637, middle half $140,000 to $190,000, across 195 filings.
• California. Median $173,966, middle half $150,000 to $200,000, across 134 filings, about two thirds of the total.
• San Francisco. Median $165,000, middle half $150,000 to $190,000, across 61 filings.
• New York. Median $150,000, middle half $121,250 to $168,172, across 28 filings.
• AI, machine learning and research titles. Median $162,500, middle half $149,250 to $200,000, across 40 filings.

The most common titles were Founding Engineer, on 76 filings, and Founding Software Engineer, on 31. Founding machine learning, research and AI engineers made up most of the rest.

Founding engineers take slightly less cash than senior engineers

In the same filings, the median base for a senior software engineer in California is $179,360 across 3,873 filings, about 3% above the founding engineer median. In New York it is $160,805 across 817 filings, about 7% above. The gap is small because early-stage companies now compete for the same people as large companies do. The bigger difference is the equity, which is where a founding engineer is paid for the risk. Founding engineer equity covers how to think about that number.

What the data can and can’t tell you

These are base salaries only, so they leave out equity, bonuses and benefits, which matter more at a startup than anywhere else. They describe engineers sponsored for H-1B visas, who are a large share of founding engineers in California and New York but not all of them. A filing also records the wage a company committed to at the time, which can be lower than what it pays a year later. Read the medians as a floor for the market.

How to use it

If you’re hiring, a base near the California median of about $174,000 keeps you within reach of a strong senior engineer at a large company, and the equity has to carry the rest of the argument. Offers well under $140,000 in California sit in the bottom quarter of the filings and are likely to struggle with the strongest candidates unless the equity is unusually generous. If you’re weighing an offer, compare the base with these numbers and value the equity separately, using the questions in how to evaluate a startup offer.