The Pulse #73: Affirm Compensation Packages Made Public
A deepdive into software engineer compensation ranges at the buy-now-pay-later tech company. Also: senior engineering leadership roles are hard to get and Europe close to passing AI regulation.
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today's topics are:
Industry pulse. A roundup of recent events, with commentary. Threads launches in the EU, Beeper Mini plays cat-and-mouse with Apple, Twitter’s open source algorithm isn’t what it should be, and more.
Affirm compensation packages made public. The buy-now-pay-later company employs people as full-remote, and has revealed its pay and equity ranges. In the US, a senior engineer earns $300,033 at the mid-level. The same role takes home $232,920 (Canadian dollars) in Canada, £159,891 in the UK, €107,488 in Spain, and 407,704 zł kn Poland. Detailed breakdown of more levels, and comparing Affirm’s compensation bands with Pollen’s.
Senior engineering leadership roles are hard to get. The job market for CTO, VP of engineering, director and senior engineering manager roles is very tough, a well-networked CTO tells me.
Europe nears wide ranging AI regulation. The European Union is on the brink of passing comprehensive regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI.) Regulation is a contentious topic because it risks slowing down innovation. At the same time, the US has dipped its toes into regulating this industry, but not nearly as comprehensively as Europe plans to.
1. Industry pulse
Threads launches in the EU
Threads is a text-based messaging network, and Meta’s response to Twitter/X. The product was built in just 6 months, initially with a team of around 12 engineers – which grew to around 60 people by July. It became Meta’s fastest-growing product, with more than 100 million people signing up the first week. We cover the engineering challenges behind Threads with a member of the team.
Threads has not been available in the European Union because Meta was waiting to ensure it complied with complex and stricter privacy rules on that side of the Atlantic. Until now, that is: