Top 10 Highest Paying Tech Companies in Bellevue, WA in 2026

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Why Bellevue Matters in the 2026 Tech Pay Race
• OpenAI
• Meta
• Snowflake
• Stripe
• Airbnb
• Coupang
• Google
• Microsoft
• Amazon
• NVIDIA
• How to Compare These Offers Like an Engineer
• Frequently Asked Questions

OpenAI

If you hang around Bellevue long enough, you start to hear OpenAI offers described almost like urban legends: someone’s friend’s teammate who left a comfortable Redmond gig, moved into a west-facing condo near Downtown Park, and suddenly had a total comp number that made even Amazon L7s blink. Then you pull up the data and realize it’s not just story time. On the OpenAI Greater Seattle leaderboard on Levels.fyi, median total compensation for key software engineering levels lands around $860K, driven by unusually large equity grants layered on top of already strong base salaries.

What the numbers actually look like

For Bellevue-area engineers, those headline numbers boil down roughly to this distribution of base vs. stock:

Those figures, synthesized from Seattle-area submissions on Levels.fyi, put OpenAI ahead of the usual big-tech suspects on a pure “Sort by: Total Comp (High → Low)” view. Unlike Meta or Amazon, there’s typically no standard annual cash bonus. It’s mostly base plus equity, and the equity column is where the cells in your spreadsheet start to dwarf anything you’ll see from more traditional Eastside employers.

Why Bellevue engineers care about OpenAI on their résumé

On the day-to-day side of the window, OpenAI sits at the frontier-model layer of the stack. You’re not just consuming APIs; you’re helping define what everyone from startups in Factoria to cloud teams in South Lake Union will be reacting to next. That carries a particular kind of signaling power in the Seattle-Bellevue ecosystem:

• Every serious AI startup on the Eastside understands OpenAI’s tools and papers, so the brand is instantly legible.
• Cloud giants in the region increasingly build around or alongside OpenAI’s models, making that experience transferable back into Azure, AWS, or GCP roles.
• The broader local AI scene, from product consultancies to boutique ML shops cataloged on Clutch’s list of Bellevue AI firms, tends to treat OpenAI experience as a fast-track credential.

If your long-term goal is to be deep in AI - whether that’s research-adjacent work, applied generative AI, or infrastructure for large-scale training - this is the kind of line on a résumé that can tilt conversations and compensation for years.

Hidden variables: equity risk, vesting, and fit

From a distance, an OpenAI offer looks like the penthouse listing with the jaw-dropping price tag. Up close, there are a few variables you have to model explicitly instead of hand-waving away:

• Equity risk vs. upside: A huge fraction of your comp is in stock or stock-like units. You need to know whether you’re getting RSUs or options, what valuation they’re pegged to, and what realistic liquidity paths look like. A nominal $550K/year in stock at L5 is very different depending on whether you can actually sell it, and when.
• Vesting details: Public data doesn’t lock down a canonical vesting schedule, so you have to get the specifics in writing. Is there a one-year cliff? Are grants straight-line over four years or front-loaded? Are refreshers common after year one or two, or are you mostly riding your initial grant?
• Cash-flow comfort: Bellevue rent and Eastside cost of living are real. Sanity-check whether you’d still be comfortable on just the base salary plus a conservative estimate of what you’ll actually realize from equity each year.
• Career-stage alignment: For senior engineers with savings and strong fallback options at local giants, the combination of brand and upside can be career-defining. For new grads trying to cover roommates, loans, and a small apartment near the Transit Center, the volatility can be more stress than it’s worth.

In other words, OpenAI is that stunning top-floor unit with an HOA fee that changes based on market conditions. The listing price - the median total comp graph on a salary site - tells you why everyone’s talking about it. But before you sign, you need to read the fine print on equity, think about how much risk you actually want to carry, and decide whether this particular view over downtown Bellevue is worth tying so much of your compensation to one company’s trajectory in AI.

Meta

Walk past Meta’s footprint in the Seattle metro and it feels a lot like walking past one of those new Bellevue high-rises: not the tallest building on the skyline, but very obviously built to compete with the giants next door. In compensation terms, Meta has done exactly that in Greater Seattle/Bellevue, with public datasets showing median total compensation around $424K for software engineers, and Washington-wide averages near $194,735 according to ZipRecruiter’s Meta salary estimates. It’s the kind of number that jumps out when you hit “Sort by: Total Comp (High → Low)” and see it sitting comfortably above most local offers.

Compensation snapshot in the Seattle-Bellevue market

Meta’s local packages lean on a familiar big-tech recipe: strong base salary, substantial RSU grants, and performance-based cash bonuses, all under a fairly standard four-year vesting schedule (commonly 25% per year) with stock refreshers for high performers. Bellevue-area salary reports on sites like Glassdoor’s Meta engineer page back this up, and engineers consistently rate compensation and benefits highly.

From an engineer’s spreadsheet point of view, Meta’s big differentiator is how much of your comp shows up in the equity column once you hit E5 and above. At those levels, the RSU grant isn’t just a nice add-on; it’s the dominant term in your compensation equation.

Why Meta is interesting for AI/ML in Bellevue

On the work side, Meta in the Seattle-Bellevue corridor is less about shiny headquarters and more about production-scale ML problems. Local teams are deeply involved in things like large-scale recommendation and ranking systems, generative AI features across products, and the infrastructure that keeps training and inference efficient at Meta’s scale. For someone living in Bellevue, this means you can work on systems that affect billions of users without giving up the Eastside lifestyle or the benefit of no state income tax on your high RSU-driven income.

• If you care about recommender systems, you’re close to the core “what to show” engines behind feeds and ads.
• If you’re more of an infra person, there are paths into the tooling, distributed training, and efficiency layers that keep those models shippable.
• The E3→E6 ladder is well understood across big tech, which makes later moves to Amazon, Microsoft, or Eastside AI startups more straightforward.

How to read a Meta offer in this market

The catch with Meta isn’t whether the sticker price is high; it’s how much of that sticker is tied to stock performance and how that aligns with your risk tolerance. When you model a Bellevue offer, it’s worth building a quick year-by-year cash-flow table: base plus expected bonus plus RSU vesting at current price, then re-running it with the stock 30% lower to see how your lifestyle holds up. Because vesting is typically even (around 25% per year) and refreshers are common for solid performers, the profile is more stable than back-loaded structures like Amazon’s 5/15/40/40 - but still meaningfully exposed to market swings. For early-career engineers, E3 and E4 roles offer a strong mix of brand, learning, and pay. For senior folks, E5 and E6 can climb into OpenAI territory on total comp while still giving you the relative predictability of a public-company ticker and a well-understood promotion system.

Snowflake

Every so often, a name pops up in Bellevue offer threads that isn’t one of the usual cloud giants, but the numbers look suspiciously similar. Snowflake is one of those. It doesn’t have a campus the size of Redmond or a logo on half the towers downtown, but pull up its Bellevue entries on sites like 6figr’s Snowflake salary snapshot and you’ll see software engineers landing in the high-$200Ks to near-$400Ks on total compensation. Levels.fyi’s Bellevue leaderboard even pegs Snowflake’s median total comp for software engineers around the mid-$400Ks, which is why it keeps showing up near the top when people sort their spreadsheets by TC.

How the compensation actually breaks down

Under the hood, Snowflake’s Bellevue packages look less like a scrappy startup and more like a focused, high-paying enterprise player: strong base salaries, meaty RSU grants, and a smaller role for cash bonuses. Public aggregates from 6figr and related salary reports suggest something like this across common engineering titles:

RSUs typically vest over four years on a roughly straight-line schedule, though exact patterns (25/25/25/25 vs. slightly front- or back-loaded) depend on the specific grant. Compared with peers, Snowflake leans harder on base + RSUs and less on variable bonus, which can be attractive if you prefer fewer moving parts in your annual cash-flow math. Indeed’s Bellevue listings for Snowflake engineers, summarized on the company’s Snowflake software engineer salary page, reinforce the picture of six-figure bases plus substantial equity on top.

Why Snowflake is interesting for AI/ML careers

From an AI/ML perspective, Snowflake sits at the data and infrastructure layer rather than the frontier-model layer. Your day job isn’t inventing new architectures; it’s making sure other people’s models have clean, fast, scalable data to learn from. For a Bellevue-based engineer, that can be a smart play:

• You get deep exposure to data warehousing, query engines, and multi-cloud infra, all of which underpin real-world ML systems.
• Customers use Snowflake to power feature stores, analytics pipelines, and MLOps workflows on top of AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• The skills you build translate directly into roles at Amazon (especially AWS), Microsoft’s Azure orgs, or Eastside AI startups that need people who understand data plumbing, not just models.

If you think of the AI stack as everything from GPUs up to product features, Snowflake keeps you solidly in the middle: close enough to ML to stay relevant, but focused on the reliability and performance layers that many teams quietly struggle to hire for.

How to sanity-check a Snowflake offer

On paper, a Snowflake offer can look like a boutique high-rise unit with big windows and fewer neighbors: expensive, but not as crowded as the mega-complexes. Before you sign, it’s worth doing a bit of structured analysis:

• Equity vs. salary balance: Translate the RSU grant into a percentage of your total comp. If stock is more than half the package, your effective pay is tied closely to Snowflake’s share price; decide if that volatility works for you.
• Title vs. scope: Some “SWE I” roles carry senior-like comp because of equity. Make sure the expectations, scope, and promotion path line up with where you actually are in your career.
• Career stage fit: For mid-level and senior engineers who already have solid fundamentals, Snowflake offers near-FAANG money for deeply useful data-infra experience. For juniors, the upside is real, but only if you’re confident you’ll get the mentorship and breathing room you need, not just a large RSU number on a screen.
• After-tax reality: With Washington’s lack of state income tax, those RSUs can translate into meaningfully higher take-home than an equivalent nominal package in California or New York, which matters when you’re pricing Bellevue rents against your actual year-1 and year-2 vesting.

Stripe

Stripe shows up in a lot of Eastside offer comparisons even though it doesn’t have the same physical footprint in Bellevue as Amazon or Microsoft. Many teams hire remotely into the Seattle-Bellevue talent pool, and the compensation they put on the table is firmly in “top-tier Bay Area” territory. According to Levels.fyi’s Stripe data for the Greater Seattle area, software engineers see a median total compensation around $207.6K, with senior and staff levels climbing far higher.

How Stripe pays in the Seattle-Bellevue market

Stripe’s structure is a fairly clean mix of base, equity, and bonus, with equity (RSUs) vesting over four years and performance-based cash on top. The Bellevue-adjacent numbers from Levels.fyi submissions break down roughly like this:

Even at L1, those numbers are competitive with many local big-tech entry offers; by L3 and L4, Stripe is paying in a band that overlaps with some of the highest-paying companies in the country. It’s not an accident that Stripe shows up in national rundowns of top-paying tech employers, like the high-compensation lists covered in Yahoo Finance’s survey of top tech pay. For engineers living in Bellevue, the combination of strong equity and Washington’s lack of state income tax means those RSUs can translate into more take-home than a similar nominal package in San Francisco or New York.

Fintech problems that matter for AI/ML careers

On the work side, Stripe is less “research lab” and more “high-stakes applied ML.” The company’s core problems are classic fintech challenges that happen to be intensely data-driven: fraud detection and risk modeling, dispute prediction, dynamic pricing and revenue optimization, and search and retrieval over APIs and documentation using embeddings and generative models. For a Bellevue-based engineer trying to build an AI/ML career, that gives you a few specific advantages:

• You get hands-on experience with real-time, revenue-critical ML systems where false positives and false negatives both have dollar signs attached.
• You work in a domain (payments and financial infrastructure) that Eastside startups, cloud providers, and larger enterprises all care about.
• The skills you build in anomaly detection, ranking, experimentation, and ML-driven product design translate well to local employers in commerce, cloud, and B2B SaaS.

How to evaluate a Stripe offer from Bellevue

When you line a Stripe offer up next to something from Amazon or Microsoft, the numbers can look very similar at first glance. The differences show up once you break compensation into cash-flow by year and think about your own risk tolerance. Stripe’s packages are more balanced than extremely back-loaded structures: you’ll see meaningful equity vest in year one, but a lot of your upside is still tied to where the company’s valuation goes from here. That’s why it’s worth asking for the implied share price on your RSUs, double-checking how bonuses are targeted at your level, and then modeling a “stress case” where the stock is 20-30% lower. If the resulting base-plus-equity still comfortably covers Bellevue rent, savings, and some buffer, Stripe can be a compelling way to get top-tier fintech pay while working on ML-heavy systems from your apartment a short walk from the Transit Center.

Airbnb

On paper, Airbnb looks like the sort of listing you don’t expect to see in a Bellevue search: not many units, but the few that exist are squarely at the top of the “Price: High → Low” sort. Public Bellevue tech salary boards put Airbnb’s median total compensation for software engineers around $555K, which means it routinely shows up in the same band as the most aggressive payers in the region, even though you don’t see its logo on every other tower downtown.

Where Airbnb sits in the Bellevue pay stack

Data points for Airbnb’s Seattle-area office are thinner than for the usual Eastside anchors, but the median figure around $555K strongly suggests that most reported roles are mid-to-senior level and above. You won’t find a big pipeline of entry-level roles here; what you see instead is a narrow slice of highly paid engineers whose compensation clusters in the upper range of what Bellevue offers. That stands out in a market where many software engineers are already earning mid-six-figure packages, as reflected in general Seattle salary surveys like ReadySetHire’s breakdown of software engineer pay in the region.

The structure is familiar: competitive base salary, a large RSU grant vesting over four years, plus annual cash bonuses and refreshers. At these numbers, your equity component isn’t a side dish; it’s a central ingredient in the total comp recipe, and you feel every movement in the stock price in a very real way against your Bellevue rent.

Why Airbnb matters for AI/ML careers

Airbnb’s product surface is an applied ML playground: search and ranking across millions of listings, dynamic pricing and yield management, fraud and abuse detection, and increasingly, generative tools for hosts and guests. For someone living on the Eastside who wants to work on consumer marketplace ML without defaulting to Amazon, Airbnb offers a focused alternative. The experience you get - designing models that balance conversion, trust, and revenue - is highly transferable to local marketplace and travel players, including the crop of well-funded startups cataloged on platforms like Wellfound’s list of Bellevue startups, as well as to larger marketplace teams across the Seattle metro.

How to vet an Airbnb offer beyond the median

Because Airbnb doesn’t hire at Bellevue scale, each individual offer matters more - you’re not just one of thousands of local SDEs. That’s where it helps to think past the headline $555K median and treat the offer like a floor plan rather than a price tag. Break the package into base, bonus, and RSUs; map out year-1 through year-4 cash flow at current stock price; then re-run the numbers with the stock 20-30% lower to see whether the lifestyle you’re picturing near Bellevue Downtown Park still works. Given the selective hiring and relatively small local headcount, this is usually a better fit for mid-to-senior engineers who already have strong fundamentals and want high pay plus a well-defined consumer ML problem space, rather than for someone looking for a first job with maximal breadth and structured training.

Coupang

Coupang is one of those names that shows up in Bellevue offer spreadsheets and makes people double-check the numbers. It doesn’t have the local brand recognition of Amazon or Microsoft, but on the Levels.fyi Bellevue tech industry board, Coupang posts a median total compensation around $526.7K for software engineers. For a company often described as the “Amazon of South Korea,” that puts it squarely in the top tier when you hit “Sort by: Total Comp (High → Low)” for the Eastside.

How Coupang tends to pay in Greater Seattle

Public, level-by-level data is thinner than for the big US incumbents, but the median figure lines up with a picture where most local engineers are mid-to-senior or staff-level. Packages usually combine a strong base salary, a meaningful equity grant in Coupang’s public stock, and performance-based bonuses:

Because equity is denominated in a non-US-centric brand that still trades on US markets, the RSU component can feel a bit more “exotic” than shares from a Microsoft or Meta. When you’re modeling your cash flow against Bellevue rent, it helps to treat the stock price history like any other time series: look at volatility, trend, and how your personal risk tolerance lines up with that chart.

The ML and systems problems you’d work on

Day to day, Coupang is a global commerce and logistics company, which means its engineering problems look uncannily familiar if you’ve ever interviewed at Amazon: large-scale recommendation and personalization, high-quality search and ranking, inventory and supply-chain optimization, delivery-time prediction, fraud and risk modeling, and the tooling that keeps all of those models deployable and observable. For a Bellevue-based engineer with an AI/ML bent, that translates into:

• Hands-on work with recommender systems, demand forecasting, and routing optimization at meaningful scale.
• Exposure to cross-border and cross-language data, which can broaden your ML intuition beyond purely US-centric products.
• Experience that reads well to other commerce-heavy employers in the region, from AWS retail-adjacent teams to marketplace startups called out on lists like Built In’s Bellevue tech company roundup.

What to interrogate in a Coupang offer

Because Coupang sits somewhere between “global giant” and “niche name” in most US engineers’ mental models, a little extra diligence goes a long way before you accept an offer. Beyond the obvious base/bonus/RSU breakdown, it’s worth asking:

• How does equity behave? Look at recent stock performance and ask how your RSUs would feel if the price dropped 20-30%. Is the resulting year-1 and year-2 cash still comfortable in Bellevue?
• How cross-cultural is the org? Coupang’s Korean roots influence decision-making and communication norms. Talk to current or former Seattle-area engineers about how that plays out on their teams.
• How close is the work to your AI goals? If you want deep recommender or logistics ML, Coupang is a strong fit; if you’re chasing frontier-model research, it may be more of a stepping stone than an end state.
• What’s the promotion narrative? With fewer local engineers than the US megacorps, internal mobility and level transitions can look different; make sure you understand the expectations for moving from mid-level into the high-earning staff bands that drive that $526.7K median.

Think of Coupang as the high-end building backed by international investors: the fixtures look familiar and the price is undeniably premium, but the ownership story is different enough that you want to read the documents twice before you decide it’s the right tower for your Bellevue chapter.

Google

Step out of a Bellevue conference room after a Google loop and the contrast is obvious: across the lake, Microsoft’s campus sprawls; downtown, Amazon’s logos climb up glass towers. Google’s presence in the Seattle-Bellevue corridor is quieter, but its offers still anchor a lot of local spreadsheets. On a pure “Sort by: Total Comp” view, Google isn’t the outlier it once was, yet it remains a solid, steady line in the compensation chart rather than a volatile spike.

What Google pays around Bellevue

For early-career engineers in the Greater Seattle area, Google’s L3 software engineer roles typically land around mid-$180Ks in total compensation, with reported ranges from roughly the mid-$170Ks up into the high-$280Ks depending on team, performance, and timing. That usually breaks down into a base salary in the $140K-$150K band, an annual bonus target, and a four-year RSU grant. At higher levels, total compensation steps up in familiar big-tech increments, with staff-level engineers often seeing total packages in the $300K-$400K+ range and average base salaries around the low-to-mid $180Ks for staff roles.

One quirk worth modeling explicitly is Google’s tendency toward front-loaded vesting on RSUs (for example, a larger percentage vesting in year one, with the rest tapering). That means your first couple of years in Bellevue can look very strong on paper, but your steady-state comp will depend heavily on refreshers. When you’re comparing against more back-loaded structures - like Amazon’s 5/15/40/40 schedule, documented in postings such as the Amazon SDE roles advertised for the Seattle area - it’s worth laying out a year-by-year cash-flow table rather than just eyeballing the headline numbers.

Why Google still matters for AI/ML careers

Even if it doesn’t always win the top salary slot in Bellevue datasets, Google’s value shows up in a different column: AI and ML credibility. You’re working in an ecosystem that created TensorFlow, JAX, and many of the ideas behind modern large-scale training and serving. Teams in the Seattle metro contribute to products like Search, Ads, YouTube, and Cloud AI, all of which are essentially massive applied ML systems. That combination of hands-on work and brand signal is part of why Google routinely appears near the top of lists like Forbes’ best employers for tech workers, even in years when other companies edge it out on raw pay.

How to think about a Google offer from Bellevue

If you put a Google row next to an offer from a more aggressive payer in your spreadsheet, your instinct might be to sort descending and walk away. Instead, treat it like comparing two different floor plans at the same price point. Google’s package offers a mix of stable public equity, strong training, and a powerful ML brand. For early-career engineers, that combination can compound into better offers later - from Eastside AI startups to principal-track roles at the local cloud giants - even if you give up some short-term dollars. For more senior folks, the choice often comes down to appetite for risk: a slightly lower but steadier curve at Google versus a higher-variance curve somewhere else. Either way, don’t just ask “Which cell is bigger?” Ask which trajectory you want your AI career to follow once you step out of that Bellevue interview room and decide which badge you’ll be wearing on Monday.

Microsoft

From most Bellevue balconies, you can point across Lake Washington and more or less trace the outline of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. For a lot of Eastside engineers, it’s not just the view, it’s the default plan: steady big-tech badge, a manageable commute from downtown or Crossroads, and a compensation story that might not top every leaderboard but quietly holds its own once you factor in bonuses, stock, and benefits. When people build their “offers spreadsheet,” Microsoft is often the baseline row everything else gets compared against.

How Microsoft pays on the Eastside

Locally, Microsoft’s software engineering compensation runs a wide spectrum from early-career SDE I roles into principal and beyond, with total comp rising predictably as you move up the internal level ladder. Aggregated Eastside data shows SDE I engineers at levels 59-60 typically landing around $150K-$190K in total compensation, SDE II at 61-62 around $179K+, senior SDEs at level 63 near $229K, and principal-level engineers at 65-66 in the $319K-$400K+ range. Broader Microsoft software engineering snapshots for Bellevue put the overall SWE band between roughly $301K and $789K, reflecting how much scope and equity expand at the upper levels. That’s all before you layer in things like a 50% 401(k) match up to the IRS limit and comprehensive healthcare, which move a chunk of value into the “total rewards” column rather than just salary.

From a Bellevue rent perspective, the interesting part isn’t just the headline number; it’s the mix. Microsoft leans on a blend of base salary, annual cash bonus, and RSUs that typically vest annually over several years. It’s less volatile than a startup-heavy equity package, but still gives you leveraged upside if the stock moves. General market data, like Glassdoor’s Bellevue software engineering salary benchmarks, helps put those numbers in context: Microsoft usually slots above the local median on total package, even if a few outliers beat it on raw TC.

Why Microsoft is a central node for AI/ML careers

In 2026, Microsoft is arguably the Eastside’s gravitational center for AI. The Azure-OpenAI partnership runs straight through its cloud, and products like Copilot, Azure AI services, and a long list of internal ML systems are being built and shipped by teams you can work with without ever crossing the bridge to Seattle. That matters if your goal is to stay in Bellevue or Redmond and still do serious AI work: you can move between Azure data teams, enterprise ML platforms, and applied AI product groups without changing employers, which is a kind of internal mobility most startup ecosystems can’t match. For someone coming out of a bootcamp or CS program, that also means the first few years of your career can include multiple AI-adjacent rotations without starting over on level or benefits each time.

How to read a Microsoft offer from your Bellevue apartment

If you line up a Microsoft row next to more aggressive payers, the “Sort by: Total Comp” dropdown might not push it to the top. But when you treat the offer like a full floor plan instead of just a sticker price, a few things stand out. First, the combination of stable public stock, strong benefits, and predictable bonuses makes the year-to-year variance lower than many equity-heavy alternatives. Second, Washington’s lack of state income tax means your take-home from a $220K-$300K Microsoft package in Bellevue can be meaningfully higher than a similar nominal offer in California. Finally, if you know you want to be in AI for the long term but aren’t sure yet whether you’re a research, infra, or product person, Microsoft’s breadth on the Eastside lets you explore those axes without constant job hopping. For early and mid-career engineers especially, that mix of comp, brand, and internal mobility is why “just go to Microsoft” is still a very rational default plan when you’re looking out your apartment window at the glow from Redmond’s campus.

Amazon

Walk through downtown Bellevue at rush hour and it’s hard to miss Amazon’s presence: badges in the elevators, conference rooms lit in half a dozen towers, recruiters taking calls under the skybridge by Bellevue Square. For a lot of engineers here, Amazon is the canonical “Eastside offer” row in the spreadsheet - especially because the raw numbers look strong and the stock-heavy structure can turn into serious money if you stay long enough.

How Amazon pays in Bellevue

For Bellevue-based software development engineers (SDEs), public aggregates like 6figr’s Amazon Bellevue salary data show SDE I/II (L4/L5) landing at an average total compensation around $233K, with a median near $220K and top reported earners reaching $528K+. That’s the blended effect of base salary, a sizable new-hire RSU grant, and performance-based cash.

The structure underneath is distinctive: base salary (often with a level-specific cap), a sign-on bonus that may taper over the first couple of years, and a four-year RSU grant that vests on an intentionally back-loaded schedule. That structure is why two L5 offers with the same “total comp” line can feel very different once you plot the cash out over time.

Back-loaded equity and what it means for your cash flow

Amazon’s standard vesting schedule for RSUs is 5% / 15% / 40% / 40% over four years. In practice, that means:

• Year 1: Only 5% of your grant vests, so most of your realized comp is base + any sign-on.
• Year 2: 15% vests - better, but still a warm-up.
• Years 3 and 4: The remaining 80% of the grant vests, and your realized total comp can jump dramatically if the stock cooperates.

For a Bellevue apartment budget, this matters a lot. When you compare Amazon to a company with a flatter 25/25/25/25 vesting profile, you want to look at year-1 and year-2 cash flow separately from headline four-year TC. Ask yourself: could you handle your rent, savings goals, and some buffer if all you had was base, sign-on, and that 5-15% slice of equity? If the answer is “only if the stock moons,” you’re taking on more risk than the spreadsheet might suggest at first glance.

Why Amazon is central for AI/ML work on the Eastside

On the work side, Amazon is everywhere in the local AI story. Retail and Prime Video teams run massive recommendation, search, and ranking systems; Alexa and devices teams tackle speech and on-device inference; AWS groups build the cloud infrastructure (SageMaker, Bedrock, and beyond) that a lot of other Bellevue companies rely on. That means an SDE role here can put you close to:

• Production-scale recommender systems and experimentation frameworks.
• Large-scale data pipelines and MLOps platforms running across global regions.
• Customer-facing AI features that ship to millions of users on tight performance budgets.

If your long-term plan is an AI/ML-heavy career and you want to stay on the Eastside, Amazon is effectively one of the main “hubs” on the map: time here reads well to local startups, to other cloud providers, and to any team that cares about large-scale applied ML. The tradeoff is that to fully realize the compensation Amazon advertises, you usually need to treat it like a 3-4 year commitment, not an 18-month stepping stone. For some people in Bellevue, that’s a perfectly good deal - especially with no state income tax boosting the take-home on those later vesting years. For others, the back-loaded structure is enough to nudge them toward a flatter, more predictable floor plan.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA is the odd one out on this list if you only stare at the “Sort by: Total Comp” column. Company-wide, its median software engineer package in the Seattle area sits around $154K, based on regional salary snapshots, which is far from OpenAI or Meta territory. But if you care about building a deep AI/ML career from Bellevue, it’s one of the most strategically valuable badges you can wear, because it sits at the exact point where GPUs, systems software, and large-scale training workloads meet.

How NVIDIA typically pays in the Seattle metro

Local comp data aggregates NVIDIA in with other software engineering roles, so you see a broad band rather than Bellevue-specific level ladders. Regional salary guides, like the Seattle software engineer breakdown from ReadySetHire, peg median SWE total compensation in the mid-$150Ks, and NVIDIA’s company-wide medians line up closely with that. Within that, you can think about rough ranges by seniority:

The structure follows a familiar big-tech pattern: solid base salary, a four-year RSU grant, and annual cash bonuses. NVIDIA also shows up consistently in national rankings of well-paying tech employers, such as the lists of top-paying companies compiled by outlets like Yahoo Finance’s survey of compensation leaders, even if its headline median sits below the Eastside’s most aggressive outliers.

Why the NVIDIA logo can matter more than the TC cell

What NVIDIA really sells you is not just a paycheck; it’s immersion in the part of the AI stack that everyone else depends on. Day to day, roles in the Seattle-Bellevue catchment tend to live close to CUDA, GPU kernels, systems software, distributed training, and performance profiling. That’s the kind of work that:

• Makes you fluent in how large-scale training and inference actually behave on hardware.
• Turns you into the person Eastside AI startups want when they’re trying to squeeze more throughput out of a limited GPU budget.
• Translates directly into high-leverage roles at cloud providers, MLOps platforms, and model-training shops up and down the I-405 corridor.

From a Bellevue apartment budgeting standpoint, you won’t see NVIDIA beating OpenAI or Meta on raw TC for most roles. But Washington’s lack of state income tax still means that a $160K-$220K package here can go further in take-home than a higher nominal salary in California, especially if you’re betting that the NVIDIA brand and skill set will let you trade up later.

How to evaluate a NVIDIA offer if you’re AI-focused

When you drop a NVIDIA offer into your spreadsheet next to the rest of this list, it’s tempting to sort by total comp and move on. Instead, treat it as a different kind of asset. Ask yourself whether a few years in deep systems and GPU work will unlock future offers from Bellevue AI startups, cloud AI teams, or research labs that more than pay back the gap. Then model the basics: base plus bonus plus RSUs at current price, check how comfortable that looks against local rents, and decide if you’re willing to trade some short-term cash for a sharper, more specialized AI skill profile. For many engineers on the Eastside, especially mid-career folks ready to go deep on infrastructure, that trade looks less like a compromise and more like a deliberate long-term move.

How to Compare These Offers Like an Engineer

By the time you’ve talked to a few recruiters and filled a few whiteboards, your life in Bellevue starts to look like a spreadsheet: rows for OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft; columns for base, bonus, equity, location, team. It’s natural to slam that “Sort by: Total Compensation (High → Low)” header and let the top row make the decision. The problem is that, just like a listing price on a Bellevue apartment, that single number is a very lossy way to encode what your next four years will actually feel like.

Normalize year-by-year cash flow, not just headline TC

The first pass most people skip is turning total comp into a time series. Instead of comparing four-year totals, lay out what each offer pays in year 1, year 2, year 3, year 4 after vesting and realistic bonuses. Companies with flat vesting give you a smoother line; others deliberately back-load equity so the graph spikes later.

Once you’ve charted the streams, ask two brutally practical questions: “Can I comfortably pay Bellevue rent, save, and have a buffer on just my year-1 cash?” and “If the stock is down when my big vesting years hit, does this still feel like a win?” It’s a very different decision to choose a role that pays steadily versus one that’s effectively a bet on staying three or four years.

Price in taxes, risk, and benefits like they’re first-class features

Washington’s lack of state income tax quietly tilts the math in your favor. A package that looks merely competitive on paper can produce noticeably higher take-home compared with California or New York once you remove that line item. Regional data, like the six-figure averages and projected growth outlined in Motion Recruitment’s Seattle tech salary guide, underscores how dense and competitive this market already is before you even start comparing equity curves.

At the same time, “risk” isn’t just a vibe; it’s a property of the equity term in your comp equation. RSUs in a long-established cloud giant behave differently from options or units in a private or pre-IPO company. When you evaluate offers, treat each equity grant as an explicit bet: what valuation is baked in, how liquid is it, and how would a 20-30% drop actually change your annual cash flow? Then layer benefits on top - things like 401(k) match, healthcare, and ESPP - because in Bellevue, where many engineers are already above the basics, those details are often what separate two “similar” offers.

Match the job to the AI/ML career path you actually want

Once you’ve normalized the money, the more interesting question is: which offer moves you along the AI trajectory you care about? Frontier-model labs and certain big-tech research groups are effectively a bet on cutting-edge model work. Data and infra companies are a bet on MLOps, pipelines, and platforms. Product-focused orgs in commerce, travel, and fintech are a bet on applied ML and experimentation at scale. Salary leaderboards like the Levels.fyi Bellevue tech compensation board treat all of those as identical rows, but your future self won’t. If you know you want to end up as a staff-level infra engineer, for example, it can make sense to take slightly less money now for a role that gives you deep systems and scaling experience.

Use the spreadsheets as a filter, then talk to humans

Aggregated sites compress messy human realities into clean numbers, the same way a map view turns Bellevue’s sidewalks into tidy pins. They’re invaluable for narrowing the search, but they can’t tell you how healthy a team is, whether promotions are real or theoretical, or how often people actually get to work on the AI problems that drew them in. Once you’ve used the spreadsheets to get to a short list, treat the rest like fieldwork: talk to current and former engineers, ask about realized comp versus “promised” TC, and probe for the details that never show up in a Levels entry. The goal isn’t to find the mathematically perfect offer; it’s to choose the one where the numbers, the work, and your AI ambitions all line up when you look out your own window at the Bellevue skyline and think about the next four years.

Frequently Asked Questions