In my 7 YOE, I spent 4.5 years in a very early stage no-name startup. Though I was paid less here, my learnings were huge. I was responsible for whole end to end tech stack and it helped me get so much experience which would not be possible in big companies/startups. This was the main reason I was able to clear system design interviews with ease. As I had hands-on experience in each system design aspect, I did not need much preparation for that. So, in early career, join a startup with good engineering foundation and learn. It does not matter if startup fails or succeeds, you are still very young and can try out different paths at this stage.

This is not an outlier offer. This is standard for SDE 4 and above in many companies. As you could see the breakup, stocks take up a good amount of portion. InMobi is going for IPO next year. So I belive stocks would appreciate later.

Please do proper research about market standard on bli-d and other salary discussion threads. InMobi is a good company as they did not try to low-ball me and compensated me purely based on interview feedback. I was surprised to hear this number but I got to know later from bli-d posts that this was a standard offer. If I had competing offers, this number would have gone even higher.

Before a few years, I was on the same path as most of you, reading compensation threads and wondering even if they were real. But as I progressed on my career, I came to know that these numbers are very real and they are not out of reach for anybody. Just focus on your career and the money follows.