🏡 Return back to the handbook home page
⛰️ Why are we here?
💥 How we’re building the team
💪 How we’ll support you?
⭐ Benefits
📗 Policies
💳 Expenses
🏖️ Vacations
🛠️ Engineering at Junction
📞 On call
Once a hire decision has been made post debrief, we’ll let you know the good news 🎉 For a full time employee status role, you will be walked through your offer via Pulley. This will have a calculator to show what could happen to your equity over the years.
Package 1: 50% percentile salary Minimum grant column
Package 2: 10K decrease in salary X 1.5 increase on equity
Package 3: 10K decrease in salary x 1.5 increase on equity
Note: We do not negotiate equity amounts at offer stage. For information about refresher grants, see below.
Also note that your option grant paperwork will be sent to you via Pulley after you start post board meeting approval.
All our compensation is based on the following calculator that we have built on Retool.
An explanation of the factors are below:
Seniority is not a title to be sought, everyone is considered an owner of the company. More experience does not correlate with increased importance. When a team member first joins, it is logical that their pay reflects the skill level they were hired for, over time this judgement becomes more subjective and is based on the speed with which you can ship or help the team to ship, prioritization and decision-making and your technical approach.
Steps allow us to have more flexibility within each level, to keep these simple the following levels exist:
By default we hire into Established. This allows everyone enough room for salary increases without needing to move up in seniority. The only exceptions to this are juniors/interns who are just starting out their career.
We will use the benchmark for hiring to be the market rate in San Francisco - we use Pave and other data sources. We use the following factors to determine total compensation cash + equity.
The benchmark is tied to revenue intentionally. Everyone should feel like owners and if revenue increases then that should be reflected in how much budget we can assign to hiring.
It’s important to note that we will adjust salaries depending on the revenue factors above.
Location factors are based on GitLab’s location factors, and are based on market rates, not cost of living. It is based on combination of data from Economic Research Institute (ERI), Numbeo, Comptryx, Radford, Robert Half, and Dice to calculate what a fair market rate is for each location. You can read more here.
We understand objections against using location as input, however regardless of where you work all salary is tied to market data which is all based on location. We are transparent about our calculations so that we can set clear expectations. We also ensure that everyone is paid in the top brackets for their role.
To prevent too much disparity between locations we set a global floor of 0.6 to all location factors, hence no-one will have a location factor lower than 0.6. This is to ensure there is not a large pay disparity between locations, whilst allowing us to be competitive in certain locations.
Executive roles are not compensated using the calculator - however is based on the exact same market database. Execs are expected to be thriving at baseline and we do not have separate levels or steps to represent this.
If you plan to relocate, your salary will be adjusted (up or down) to your new location at the following review. If there's a pay increase, this needs prior approval and can’t always guarantee it, due to budget constraints.