Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and more
You don’t have to be an investment banker to make big money at an investment bank. They’ve been investing heavily in tech for years and with plenty of tech roles available even now, engineers can make some serious money.
But how much? We’ve compiled thousands of datapoints from five US bulge bracket banks, courtesy of levels.fyi to see. The table below shows the average total compensation (salaries, bonuses and stock payments), for engineers and engineering managers in banks at each rank on the financial and hierarchical ladder.
Based on the data, Goldman Sachs looks like the place to be as an engineer. However, the bank has a history of discontented developers learning skills that are only really useful at Goldman, such as its proprietary language, Slang. Even now, the culture and internal profile of tech teams can be very varied; transaction banking service TxB and now defunct digibank Marcus are two stark reminders of this.
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JPMorgan, meanwhile, is the most prolific hirer of engineers. JPMorgan has 700 open roles at the moment. It also has the most compensation datapoints on Levelsfyi.
New York (and San Francisco) are the best locations to work for pay, but just how far above the rest you are again depends on your bank. JPMorgan has the largest disparity between its global average and its New York average (although this may be caused by a disparity in the number of people providing data to Levels fyi by seniority).
In recent years, however, another exciting technical role has risen in prominence; the product manager. Average pay for three of the banks can be seen in the table below.
Product roles, by-and-large, are much less technical than engineering roles, which may explain the lower average pay. This would be fine if the work were more fulfilling, however Glassdoor reviews by product managers at Goldman Sachs average at just 3.6 stars, marginally below the average of 3.8 given by engineers.
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