I’m not sure. At average companies, I think SWEs and data scientists make about the same. But the top companies have a much larger software engineering population to choose from, so they can afford to be picky, and the pay correspondingly reflects that. There’s about 20x as many software engineers as there are data scientists in the world.

I think this is changing though, and I think “data scientist” will soon be split into sub-roles. Some companies like Lyft have already changed their title scheme. Business analysts are now data scientists, and those who were data scientists are now research scientists.

The company I work for has an internal job role that isn’t public and an external title that is. So a “data scientist” may have an internal role of “business analyst” or an internal role of “applied scientist”, and there’s a big difference in pay despite the same outward-facing title.

I think the pay scale goes:

Data scientist (business analyst) < data scientist (non-CS PhD) < software engineer = core data scientist (CS PhD) < AI researcher (ML PhD + great publications)

I have a non-CS PhD so I think that’s why I don’t make as much as a software engineer or a core data scientist.

Base salary and bonus is generally the same for all roles for a given experience level; the difference in comp. comes from the RSUs granted.