Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is RemoteSWE.fyi?

RemoteSWE.fyi is a job board aggregator that lists the best paying remote software engineering (SWE) jobs in the United States. It saves valuable time for job seekers from manually searching, scrolling, and refreshing each company’s career page by offering a central listing that updates daily.

Users can easily see which companies have the most opening positions and are actively hiring, as well as the estimated salary and posted date for each position. They can also filter positions by years of experience or by companies to find suitable matches.

This site is built with ❤️ by remote SWEs, for remote SWEs.

2. How does RemoteSWE.fyi work?

RemoteSWE.fyi deploys a background job that runs daily in the afternoon to pull the latest job postings from each company and updates the website with the new listings. At the moment, it pulls from 14 companies. More companies will be added over time.

3. What does “best paying” mean?

Different types of company pay software engineer at different bands. The best paying companies are usually tech companies, where tech is the core competency of the business and software engineers are first class citizens who play a key role in building the core products, e.g. FAANG, Dropbox, Pinterest, etc. These companies pay top of market to attract top talents and build high quality software.

This differs from non-tech companies whose core competencies aren’t necessary tech but other areas. For example, a newspaper company like NY Times values editorial content over software, and an information provider like WebMD values medical expertise more.

Tech companies pay 2-3x more than non-tech companies for similar roles, and they are the focus of the RemoteSWE.fyi listing.

To learn more about compensation differences across the industry, Gergely Orosz’s Trimodal Nature of Tech Compensation is a great resource.

4. Where are the salary data sourced from?

Tech companies typically structure salary, often called total compensation, into 3 parts: base salary, equity, and bonus.

Base salary is pulled directly from each job post, thanks to the U.S. Pay Transparency laws (e.g. California SB-1162 in 2011), which require companies to include salary ranges in job listings to help address wage gaps caused by bias or discrimination.

Total compensation is sourced from levels.fyi, a platform that collects leveling and salary info through crowdsourcing.

Unfortunately, current laws in many states, such as Washington RCW 49.58.110 in 2022, only require companies to provide base salary ranges along with a general description of other forms of compensation. This allows companies to omit equity and bonus details. Hopefully, future legislation will help close this gap.

5. Does higher salary mean a better job?

Not necessarily. A higher salary can definitely make a job offer more competitive and attractive, but it's only one of many factors to consider. Other important aspects include the company, team roles, on-call workload, people, culture, work-life balance, benefits, growth opportunities, and more.

Additionally, starting salary might not stay the same over time. For example, equity often makes up a good portion of compensation. If you join when the company's stock price is high, a future drop in value can reduce overall pay. Some companies also provide yearly stock refreshes, while others do not, which can further impact long-term salary.

To start, RemoteSWE.fyi focuses on making it easier to compare salaries across companies. Over time, it will continue expanding to improve other aspects of the remote job experience.

6. Is RemoteSWE.fyi affiliated with levels.fyi or layoffs.fyi?

No. The .fyi domain name was chosen for its growing popularity among information sites for software engineers and its lower cost at $5.64/year compared to $7.98 or $11.06 /year for .com domain name (source: porkbun).

Still, sites like levels.fyi and layoffs.fyi to better serve software engineers are inspirations for RemoteSWE.fyi, which aims to become a community-driven information hub for remote software engineers, starting with a job board aggregator.

7. How to get in touch?

If you have questions, suggestions for improving RemoteSWE.fyi, or are interested in a partnership, feel free to reach out to us at hello@remoteswe.fyi