Salary Benchmarking

Here is the Senior Software Engineer band for the US, read from your comp data in the Knowledge Center. The band runs from a floor of $145,000 to a midpoint of $172,000 and a ceiling of $205,000. Your seven current engineers in this role average $166,000, which sits about 4% under the midpoint.

At the team level this reads as healthy. An average of $166,000 against a $172,000 midpoint is a normal, defensible spot to be in — slightly below mid, with room to move people up as they grow rather than everyone already pinned to the ceiling. The band itself is wide enough ($145,000 to $205,000) to reward range without breaking structure.

The average hides the real issue, though. Two of the seven engineers sit below the $145,000 floor of their own band. Here is where a sample of the team lands against it.

Engineer C at $189,000 is comfortably in the upper band, Engineer E at $170,000 is right at midpoint, and Engineer A at $158,000 is a touch under mid but well inside the range. Engineer B at $141,000 and Engineer D at $143,000 are the exceptions: both are paid less than the minimum the company itself set for the role. That is textbook salary compression, and it is a concrete retention risk — the two people most likely to notice they are underpaid are the two easiest to poach.

Net: the team average is reasonable, but two engineers below the band floor is a specific, fixable equity gap to put on the agenda for the next comp cycle. Worth flagging that this read is grounded in your own internal bands and current salaries, not an external market survey — if you want to test the band against outside pay data, that data would need to be added to the Knowledge Center first.