"I asked what the role was in the comment you are replying to. Do you have data to back up the "huge swath" assertion? Certainly there are a few individual companies that have been able to provide specialized roles a $380k base salary, and companies who have been able to provide that and above on total comp thanks to an amazing run on equity value over the past 10 years. I don't think anyone is arguing that there are situations when this happens, that's not the point. It's irregular, it's naive to think that is the norm."

It's basically what the salary looks like in the USA at a top tier company in a top tier city. Go look at https://www.levels.fyi/ for base salary excluding equity. Equity goes up by level.

As for this role, it sounds basically like a mid career engineers salary. i.e 5-12 years of relevant experience. Hard to know exactly because geography impacts salary bands at Coin.

I can't remember what HR tells us, but I think we are targeting pay for the top 25% of companies/engineers in the USA.

"The OP specified salary- if they're referring to total comp, that'd be an important distinction for them to make in the future."

I work at Coinbase, it's not salary, it's total comp. I'm assuming the OP was a bit confused. At least half that figure is equity.

"Its anybodies guess what the actual value of equity in a total comp package will be a year from now. As an example, if you took a $380k TC package at Shopify 6 months ago and 40% of that was equity, it's now looking like $280k."

As I mentioned earlier, each year Coinbase give you a new equity grant priced at the start of the year. I.e thirty day average, I believe.

So if the equity tanks one year, the next year you will be reset to 380k total comp. Assuming of course we are not in a multi year bear market and you don't get laid off, which is always a possibility in tech.

Also some companies, such as Netflix allow you to take a cash only salary that would be comparable to this.