Tech Salary Intel 2026: What senior engineers and leaders are actually earning
Our annual data from 400+ placements at Staff, Principal, VP, and CTO level. London, hybrid, remote. The numbers most firms can't or won't publish.
Every January and again every July, we sit down with our placement data from the previous six months and ask the same question: what are the senior engineering, ML, product, and design hires in our market actually earning?
The data below covers 400+ completed placements over the eighteen months to March 2026, exclusively at Staff and above. We have anonymised everything that needs anonymising and rounded everything that needs rounding. The numbers are accurate to within a few percent.
Headline numbers
Staff Backend Engineer at a scaling consumer business in London: £165k–£210k base, plus equity that varies wildly. The median offer in our data is £180k base.
Principal Engineer at the same kind of business: £200k–£260k base. Median £220k. The top decile is meaningfully above this.
VP of Engineering at a Series B–D scale-up: £260k–£360k base. Median £290k. Equity is what makes the difference at this level — base alone rarely closes the strong candidates.
Head of Product at a Series B+ business: £170k–£220k base. Median £190k. Product leadership is consistently underpaid relative to engineering leadership at the same level, in our data.
Senior ML Engineer at AI-native scale-ups: £155k–£200k base. Median £175k. The market has compressed in the last six months as foundation model labs have settled into more sustainable hiring patterns.
What’s moved in the last twelve months
The compensation for AI and ML roles has stabilised after a particularly hot period in mid-2024. Top-decile offers are still extreme but the median has come back to earth.
Staff and Principal Engineer compensation continues to compound. The gap between Senior and Staff is now substantially wider than it was two years ago.
Engineering Leadership at the VPE and CTO level is meaningfully more competitive than at the IC level — fewer candidates, more pressure to compete on equity rather than base.
What we hear from candidates
The two most common candidate priorities, in declining order: equity quality (not headline strike price), and quality of engineering leadership. Compensation in absolute terms is third.
That ranking has flipped in the last eighteen months. Two years ago compensation was the dominant driver.
What we tell clients
Pay at or above the 75th percentile if you actually want to close strong candidates. Be honest with yourself about the equity story. Be honest with yourself about your engineering leadership.
If you want the underlying data behind these numbers, request the full report. We share it with serious firms on request, in confidence.
