Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?
I have a friend who is a cloud architect at a big-4, he is making a little more than $300k in total comp in NY (base is lower,  a lot of RSUs etc), but he is more than just an engineer.<p>He has a friend at another big-4 in NY, also a cloud architect, he is making $400k<p>I think that the $1 million package is incorrectly calculated. This is perhaps the total package for 2-3 years, including signing bonus (vested over a couple of years) and RSUs (vested over a couple of years)<p>Annual total compensation for any big-4 Sr software engineer with a lot of experience in SF I assume is around $300k and can get up to $500k if you are really good.<p>I don&#x27;t know of anyone who is making $1 million a year, even senior directors at big-4s. Perhaps if you are a Phd who worked at Google cloud &#x2F; AWS &#x2F; Azure for 5 years, wrote their software, talk at cloud conferences, wrote &quot;Cloud computing for experts&quot; type of books and published a seminal paper on distributed computing, then perhaps you will get a total compensation nearing that.<p>If you are just a cloud architect at a big-4 I think the lower part makes sense in total comp, the upper bound sounds completely ridiculous. I have friends who got offers from Amazon and Google for very, very senior cloud positions, way more than &quot;just a cloud engineer&quot;, and the total comp is around $300-$400. If the stock goes up though, then the RSUs might be worth much more.<p>If LinkedIn &#x2F; Facebook are offering engineers an annual $1 million I&#x27;ll be very surprised.