Google | L5 | Zürich
Anonymous User
4853

Hi,
thanks to massive preparation on Leetcode I made the interview for a Senior Software Engineer position at Google Zürich. In the prospective team I will do full-stack engineering. As expected the first offer is low, awfully low. I would like to end at least around the median according to levels.fyi (https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engineer/).
Me: getting my PhD this summer, Master and BSc degrees in CS and BSc in Bioinformatics. 3 yrs fulltime working experience in research: large-scale systems at university and ML at Microsoft Research. Part-time experiences for at least 8 yrs in software testing, or research in distributed systems.
Initial offer:

  1. Base: 134k CHF/yr
  2. Annual Bonus: 15%
  3. Equity: 70k USD/yr
  4. Sign-on bonus: 18.5k

What should I aim for and how should I proceed? The median for the base salary should be around 150-190k CHF/yr, should my counter offer then be above that figure, like 200k? It is primarily the base salary I want to adjust, about the rest I don't care much honestly. However, I have heard that the compensation team has less bandwidth within they can adjust the base salary. Whereas Equity bonuses are easier to raise.

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