The UK's highest paid tech jobs are at Citadel & Jane Street
If you want to be one of the highest paid software engineers in London, you'll probably have to work in financial services.
Click here to follow our new WhatsApp channel, and get instant news updates straight to your phone 📱.
Levels.fyi recently released a compensation heatmap for Europe which breaks down average pay and top-paying employers. In the UK, average engineer pay was £87.8k ($112k) and the top three employers were all from finance: hedge funds Citadel and Exoduspoint Capital Management, and electronic trading firm Jane Street.
Levels didn't break down average pay for UK engineers in those companies specifically, but we've compiled average pay figures for each firm based on Levels.fyi data from the past two years, including the average salary, and highest total compensation. These figures are unverified by the firms themselves, and may not reflect the full compensation picture at them. It's merely a snapshot of what you could earn.
Jane Street appears to pay the highest salaries on average. The majority of UK-based engineers reported salaries of £175k without much deviation. The biggest bonuses appear to be on offer to technologists at Citadel, however, which has the highest average total compensation of £285.7k.
The figures also highlight that if you want to make the real money at these firms, you probably want to be a trader. Average pay for engineers falls short of the firmwide average pay seen in Companies House filings for the UK entities of each of these firms. At Jane Street, for example, average total compensation in the UK was £540k in 2023. Citadel's global average pay is thought to be over $2.5m.
Levels' heatmap also revealed that engineers in Switzerland make more on average than UK engineers, earning an average TC of £119.8k. There, the top paying firms are Meta, Google and Palantir.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, WhatsApp: (+1 269 237 3950). Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
