FAANG tends to pay ~300k for senior engineers. For 400k you usually need to get lucky with stock appreciation.

Nah, that wasn’t my experience (apple/Facebook). Just look at the levels posted here:

https://www.levels.fyi

Hitting 400k total comp if you have the right experience (5-10 years, good brand university or companies) is totally doable.

But the is a big difference between total compensation and salary. Just to be clear

You can't just claim one absolute number as the comp for all "senior engineers".

There's a huge amount of variance, within FAANG and elsewhere.

As a simple example, SDE III at Amazon typically pays a bit more than $300k. Principal SDE, the next rank above that, will pay well over $400k.

And don't forget that during years of steep stock appreciation, like much of the past decade, actual compensation will often be higher than that.

I can pretty much guarantee you’ll only get that in the US.