Hi community members,
For a person with 15 years of experience as software developer in product companies (US big techs, India location) and with 4 years of those specializing in data science, what is a reasonable minimum base salary if she is considering an offer (designation is AI Engineer) from a US-based startup? She took a 10 month break after her last job. Last CTC was INR 65 LPA. The startup gave her an option of joining on a contract basis with option to convert to FTE later, but they offer only INR 18 LPA for "part time" job. The only advantage of contract basis is that she was told that she would need to work on just one project at a time and won't have any support or oncall responsibility.

18 LPA would have been low had it been a year ago, but since a lot of layoffs are happening, we are unsure if salaries have come down across the industry.