We pay $400-700k for L4-L6 and we have a hard time finding qualified candidates.

Then it’s not enough. This isn’t hard.

Your statement is trivially true in terms of market mechanics, but considering that $400k/yr for an individual puts him in the 99th percentile of all income earners in the US, the argument gets a little harder to make.

I reckon a L4-L6 engineer should be in the 99th percentile of talent and value for US workers so I don’t see the problem.

"400k" (he/she says they work for a private company so they haven't told us how much of that is actual cash in hand) and also in an unknown location which could be the bay area which in that case, just go work for Google/Meta/Netflix and make that money in cash/RSUs.

Yeah it's SF/Seattle/Chicago

$400k is base + bonus

I fail to see how the argument got harder, please enlighten me how the fact that other people make less means this job should pay less even though it currently can’t attract the talent they want

Maybe they haven't advertised the job anywhere.

Define "qualified".

Can design and launch a software product that will scale to 100M reqs/day on pretty much unlimited infrastructure.

It's also fintech, so there is no room for error.

That's extremely vague. What kind of requests? Scale to 100M requests a day with any budget for infrastructure? Or is just choosing naive autoscaling without considering costs not ok? Are the requests evenly spread out throughout the day?

What do you mean "no room for error"? Every networked application has errors. Do you mean that the application should never throw an error? Or that errors should always be retried an infinite number of times? Or that requests should not get dropped and should be guaranteed to me handled? And how do you guarantee that? It is quite impossible to have an application that serves 100M requests a day from real users and have 0 errors or dropped packets.

I'll take it. My resume probably doesn't match your qualifications, but hey I'm sure you guys are willing to train people up where they're deficient, right? For that kind of pay, I'd never leave - surely me being a drag on productivity for 6 months while I come up to speed is an acceptable trade, right?

Do you work in big tech, high finance, or private equity?

midsize fintech "startup" 1500 employees with ~$2B ARR.

I’m interested, work in finance, and am in Chicago. How do i apply?