Tech recruitment, San Francisco.

The Bay Area market

Senior engineers, SF and Peninsula.

The Bay Area is the deepest senior engineering market in the world, with concentrated AI talent at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, and a tail of well-funded scale-ups. Senior IC compensation is the highest globally and equity remains a meaningful part of total comp.

Hybrid is the dominant pattern but expectations vary widely: AI-native frontier labs are often four-to-five days onsite, while traditional SaaS scale-ups remain at two-to-three days.

Salary bands 2026

What you should pay senior engineers in SF.

Bands are base only. Total compensation at Series C and later AI-native scale-ups commonly runs 100-200% above base when equity is included; some frontier labs structure equity such that total compensation reaches USD 1M+ at staff levels.

How Re:Sourced operates in SF

Sydney delivery, Bay Area network.

Sydney-based delivery aligns naturally to early-morning SF time, which is when most candidate calls happen. We run SF searches as a specialist partner where the brief is hard to fill (deep AI engineering, forward-deployed, founding engineer profiles).

For straightforward senior software hires in the Bay Area, a US-based generalist firm is usually a better fit. Where we add value: hard-to-find profiles, founding engineer searches, and US-headquartered teams hiring across both SF and Sydney/Melbourne.