Vetted senior developers for US engineering teams

We assess developers properly, publish the data behind every number on this site, and tell you when hiring locally would serve you better.

What we do

We find, assess and place senior software developers with US engineering teams. You tell us what the work is and what your team already has; we come back with a short list of people we would stand behind, along with our reasoning, including the reservations.

We are not a job board and we are not a body shop. The assessment is the product. Anyone can forward CVs, and forwarding CVs is why most technical hiring processes waste the time of the people least able to spare it. We do the filtering so your engineers interview two or three people rather than twelve.

Where we think hiring locally is the better answer, we will say so. That happens more often than it might sound, and a referral we do not earn from is cheaper than an engagement that should not have started.

Why the published data is on every page of this site

Most sites in this market quote salary figures with no source. We publish the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics instead, alongside our own view, so you can check the numbers rather than take them on trust. Every wage figure on this site is a metropolitan-area estimate for all employers in that occupation, not a rate we are quoting.

It is published this way because the alternative is worse. A team that benchmarks a role against an invented figure sets a band that is wrong in one direction or the other, and then spends a quarter discovering it. The published band for the actual occupation, in the actual metro, is the honest starting point even when it is inconvenient.

The US technical labour market in numbers

Software development is one of fourteen technical occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes separately. Together they account for about 4,860,150 people, of whom 1,687,890 are software developers, which is why that one occupation dominates most conversations about technical hiring. The other thirteen matter because they compete for the same people.

US technical occupations, annual wages, May 2025
Occupation	Employed	25th percentile	Median	75th percentile	90th percentile
Software Developers	1,687,890	$105,210	$135,980	$171,980	$214,670
Web Developers	70,190	$64,230	$92,650	$126,230	$162,290
Web and Digital Interface Designers	113,330	$73,290	$104,000	$158,820	$201,550
Software QA Analysts and Testers	186,740	$80,310	$104,300	$133,180	$167,010
Data Scientists	262,440	$85,660	$120,230	$158,880	$199,130
Information Security Analysts	190,650	$97,810	$129,180	$163,500	$199,850
Computer Systems Analysts	519,530	$82,860	$105,850	$134,110	$167,710
Computer Programmers	92,230	$75,850	$100,390	$130,680	$160,460
Database Architects	67,140	$109,370	$139,500	$169,290	$204,000
Database Administrators	69,990	$79,610	$104,620	$135,460	$163,320
Computer Network Architects	179,740	$104,620	$134,050	$168,200	$202,680
Network and Computer Systems Administrators	314,340	$78,010	$99,130	$126,640	$155,050
Computer and Information Systems Managers	670,570	$138,060	$175,140	$220,730	$297,510
Computer Occupations, All Other	435,370	$79,370	$116,580	$157,500	$188,470

Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 national file, read 25 September 2026. Figures cover all US employers.

The spread across these titles runs from $175,140 for computer and information systems managers down to $92,650 for web developers. That gap is the practical reason technical people move sideways between titles rather than upward within one: for many engineers the fastest available pay rise is a change of job title rather than a change of employer. If you are hiring at the lower end of that range, expect to lose some candidates to the upper end of it, and expect that to happen after they have accepted.

It is worth reading the employment column alongside the wage column. Occupations with small headcounts, such as database administrators and architects, are specialisms where a local search will frequently produce nobody, regardless of what you are prepared to pay. Occupations with large headcounts are where a well-run process matters more than a generous band, because the people exist and the competition is for their attention.

How much US markets differ

Ranked by median annual wage for software developers, the gap between the highest and lowest of these 28 metro areas is a factor of about 1.7. San Jose sits at the top with a median of $213,110 and Pittsburgh at the bottom with $124,500. A budget built from the national median of $135,980 will be wrong in both, in opposite directions.

Software developers by US metro area, ranked by median wage, May 2025
Metro area	Employed	Median wage	vs US median	Location quotient
San Jose, CA	87,350	$213,110	+57%	7.09
San Francisco, CA	69,030	$186,640	+37%	2.68
Seattle, WA	92,770	$167,280	+23%	4.10
New York, NY	121,000	$166,830	+23%	1.17
Boston, MA	42,310	$166,090	+22%	1.44
San Diego, CA	20,610	$163,270	+20%	1.23
Los Angeles, CA	55,540	$160,920	+18%	0.82
Portland, OR	18,260	$156,000	+15%	1.39
Washington, D.C.	69,060	$154,930	+14%	2.03
Baltimore, MD	16,850	$138,900	+2%	1.14
Denver, CO	27,010	$137,610	+1%	1.55
Charlotte, NC	20,820	$135,920	0%	1.41
Chicago, IL	40,370	$134,380	-1%	0.82
Austin, TX	31,960	$134,120	-1%	2.28
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX	67,030	$133,290	-2%	1.52
Philadelphia, PA	28,480	$133,040	-2%	0.91
Atlanta, GA	36,300	$132,960	-2%	1.16
Raleigh, NC	12,580	$132,770	-2%	1.56
Miami, FL	18,900	$132,650	-2%	0.62
Phoenix, AZ	29,380	$131,750	-3%	1.14
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN	27,410	$130,920	-4%	1.29
Detroit, MI	24,870	$130,760	-4%	1.20
Tampa, FL	14,230	$130,450	-4%	0.91
Orlando, FL	13,440	$129,620	-5%	0.88
Salt Lake City, UT	19,040	$129,600	-5%	2.12
Houston, TX	22,940	$129,440	-5%	0.64
Kansas City, MO	12,160	$124,990	-8%	1.02
Pittsburgh, PA	10,320	$124,500	-8%	0.85

Location quotient compares how concentrated the occupation is locally against the national average. Above 1 means more of this work than the size of the local economy would predict.

The location quotient column is the more useful one for planning a search. A high median tells you what a role costs; a high quotient tells you whether the people exist. San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Denver, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh each have a quotient of 1.5 or above, meaning the work is concentrated there well beyond what the local economy's size would predict. Those are markets where sourcing is quick and closing is the hard part, because good candidates are already employed and will be countered.

At the other end, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Orlando, Houston, Pittsburgh have quotients below 0.9, meaning the occupation is less concentrated there than nationally. In those markets the constraint is supply rather than competition: fewer people to find, and offers that close more easily once you find them. Widening the geography early is usually cheaper than extending the timeline later.

Why technical hiring goes wrong

Most of the expensive mistakes in technical hiring are made before anybody is interviewed, and they are the same mistakes each time. They are worth naming because each one is avoidable at no cost.

The brief describes a stack rather than a system

A specification listing ten technologies and no description of what the system does filters for keyword matches. Keyword matches are exactly the candidates who get rejected in the technical round, which means the brief has selected for the people who will waste your engineers' time.

The band comes from the wrong market

A remote role competes with the markets that pay most, whether or not you are located in one. Teams that set a remote band from their own local figures have answered a different question and then conclude that nobody good is available.

The process outlasts the candidate's patience

In a concentrated market anybody worth hiring is in several conversations. Five interview stages optimise against the risk of a bad hire while creating the near-certainty of losing good ones. Adding a stage midway loses precisely the candidates the stage was meant to be careful about.

The filtering is pushed onto engineers

If your engineers are interviewing ten people per role, the most expensive people in the process are doing the cheapest part of it. Two or three properly assessed candidates is the goal; ten screened ones is a failure of the stage before.

Nobody owns the decision

Processes without a named decision-maker drift, because everybody defers and nobody declines. Candidates read this accurately as a signal about what working there would be like, and the strongest ones withdraw first.

The vacancy is not counted

Every month a role is open, the work it was meant to do is not happening. That cost is identical whichever way the seat is eventually filled, and in a specialist search it routinely exceeds the difference between the options being compared.

The setup is blamed on the hire

No running environment, no reviewer with capacity, no access to the real system. The difference between a first merged change in week one and week four is almost entirely on the employer's side, and it gets attributed to the developer far more often than to the conditions that produced it.

What the levels actually mean

Job titles are not comparable between companies, so it is more useful to describe levels by what somebody can be left to own without supervision. These are the boundaries we use, and every technology page states what each level looks like in that specific technology.

Junior: Delivers defined pieces of work inside an existing structure, with the approach decided for them. Reviews catch the things experience teaches. Valuable where there is strong direction and capacity to teach, and a poor investment where there is neither.
Mid-level: Owns a feature end to end, including its tests, its failure states and its data access. Can be given a problem rather than a solution. Still benefits from review on decisions that will be expensive to reverse.
Senior: Owns the shape of an area. Makes the decisions that are costly to change later and can justify them against the alternatives. Raises the level of the people reviewing alongside them, which is the part most often left out of the definition.
Staff: Owns cross-cutting concerns: the contracts between areas, the standards others build against, the migration path off whatever the system has outgrown. Measured by what other teams stop having to decide.

Years of experience correlate with these far less than people expect. Somebody who has spent six years maintaining one application carries less transferable judgement than somebody who has spent three across three very different ones. When a CV and a level disagree, the interview should settle it.

The most reliable seniority signal we know is what somebody has removed. Mid-level developers describe what they added. Senior ones describe a store they deleted, an abstraction they collapsed, a dependency they took out. The ability to make a system smaller is harder to fake than any amount of technical vocabulary.

How to use this site

Start from the technology if you know it

Each technology page covers what the technology actually is, the part that separates a senior developer from a mid-level one, seven things worth testing in an interview with what a strong answer and a warning sign sound like, six warning signs in an inherited codebase, what each level can be left to own, how the work is usually scoped, and the published US wage data for the occupation it belongs to. You can use all of that whether or not you ever talk to us.

Start from the market if you know where

Each location page covers the published employment and wage figures across every technical occupation in that metro, how the market has moved across the last three published releases, the employer payroll cost of a local seat using statutory rates, the industries that shape who is available, and where hiring plans in that market tend to go wrong.

Use the occupation, not the technology, to set a band

There is no official wage figure for any framework or language. There is one for the occupation, and every technology page states which occupation it belongs to so the figures can be checked against the right release. A band built from an invented technology-specific number is wrong before the search starts.

Read the location quotient, not just the median

The median tells you what a role costs. The location quotient tells you whether the people exist. A high median in a market with a low quotient means a long search rather than an expensive one, and those are different problems with different answers.

Check the dates

Every figure on this site carries its source and the date it was read. If you are reading this long after that date, the numbers have moved and the relationships between them probably have not.

Hiring by technology

Each page sets out what the technology actually is, what separates a senior developer from a mid-level one, what to test in an interview, the warning signs in an inherited codebase, and what the US market pays for the occupation it belongs to.

Hiring by US market

Wages for the same occupation vary by a factor of about two across US metro areas, and the number of people available varies by far more than that. Each page covers one market: what it pays, how deep it is, which direction it is moving, and what that means for a search.

New York, NY$166,830 median
Seattle, WA$167,280 median
San Jose, CA$213,110 median
Washington, D.C.$154,930 median
San Francisco, CA$186,640 median
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX$133,290 median
Los Angeles, CA$160,920 median
Boston, MA$166,090 median
Chicago, IL$134,380 median
Atlanta, GA$132,960 median
Austin, TX$134,120 median
Phoenix, AZ$131,750 median
Philadelphia, PA$133,040 median
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN$130,920 median
Denver, CO$137,610 median
Detroit, MI$130,760 median
Houston, TX$129,440 median
Charlotte, NC$135,920 median
San Diego, CA$163,270 median
Salt Lake City, UT$129,600 median
Miami, FL$132,650 median
Portland, OR$156,000 median
Baltimore, MD$138,900 median
Tampa, FL$130,450 median
Orlando, FL$129,620 median
Raleigh, NC$132,770 median
Kansas City, MO$124,990 median
Pittsburgh, PA$124,500 median

Frequently asked questions

What does FuturByte actually do?

We source and technically assess senior software developers and present a short list to your team, with our reasoning and our reservations. The assessment is what you are paying for; forwarding CVs is not a service.

How do you assess developers?

Working code and a conversation about decisions, rather than a quiz. We look at what someone has built, ask what they would now do differently and why, and probe the areas where their specific technology most reliably separates people. Every technology page on this site sets out what we test and why.

Where are your developers based?

We work with developers outside the US and schedule around a committed overlap with your working hours. Where a role genuinely requires presence in a specific US city, we will say so rather than pretend otherwise.

Do you work with startups or only larger companies?

Both. What matters more than company size is whether there is someone on your side who can review the work. A team with no review capacity does not benefit from more developers, whoever supplies them.

What if the shortlist is wrong?

Tell us why and we recalibrate. A rejected shortlist nearly always means the brief and the real need had drifted apart, and finding that out in week one is much cheaper than finding it out in month three.

Why do you publish government wage data on a commercial site?

Because it is checkable and most of what is published in this market is not. If our figures and the Bureau's disagree, you should be able to see it. Every page cites the release and the date it was read.