Compensation

Cash (salary and commission)

We pay competitively because we want to hire the best people and we want our teammates to be focused on helping Sourcegraph succeed, not worrying about paying bills.

Equity

We are an early-stage company, and every team member can have a huge impact on our success. We want to make sure that everyone has a financial stake in the success and that contributions are rewarded.

• See Equity FAQ.
• See How and when stock option grants are calculated.

Benefits and perks

See Benefits and perks.

Location-independent

We do not take your location into account when determining cash and equity compensation. No matter where you live, you will get the same cash and equity compensation.

To ensure our compensation is competitive even for people in high-salary/high-cost markets, we target a high percentile (from our compensation benchmarks) across the board.

Consistency

We publish and maintain internal compensation bands for every position we hire for. Recruiters and hiring managers are expected to adhere to these bands for all offers that go out, and to bring any out-of-band offers to People Ops before making them.

Negotiating should not be needed

We believe that opening up offers to negotiations can lead to inequitable and biased compensation in the long-term. We strive to reduce the impact of negotiations on offers and raises as much as possible. Our philosophy to make offers that are fair and generous is designed to ensure candidates feel appropriately valued and aren’t forced to negotiate to get to something fair.

However, given many teams and positions are still in the earliest stages of formation, our bands have low sample sizes, and we recognize that our input market data and our own tailored bands may be wrong, so candidates are still free to negotiate their offers.

Any negotiations over compensation should focus on the role and level rather than the specific numbers. If a candidate believes they deserve compensation that does not fit our bands, it is likely a disagreement about the role they can fill and the impact they can have.

Commissions and bonuses

We provide variable compensation in the form of commissions for roles that are measured by numerical performance (including certain roles in the Sales and Customer Engineering organizations), but we do not use reoccurring formal bonuses otherwise.

However, managers can occasionally grant ad hoc bonuses (cash and equity are both possible) for strong performance. In such cases, they are expected to make the case for the bonus and tie it to the bands for their organization.

As a note, our Impact reviews are one of the many data points managers can use when determining the reward of a compensation change or promotion. There is no direct correlation between the two, and Impact reviews should be viewed independently of a merit change, and as a singular data point. There was great intention in creating our Impact reviews to view them as markers of personal development rather than reviews that result in a change of pay or titles.

How bands are created

Our compensation bands are brought together by the People Ops team from multiple inputs. The process is described below:

• First, the People Ops team pulls raw benchmark data from Option Impact. This data provides benchmarks for each level and position at multiple percentiles. We use the following criteria for filtering the data we pull from Option Impact:
  • Location: All US Regions
  • Industry: Enterprise
  • Founding Status: Non-Founders
  • Capital Raised: $100M–$250M
• The latest raw data for relevant roles is copied into each team’s compensation bands spreadsheets. This will automatically update the band data.
  • The 75th and 90th percentile salary and commission compensation numbers are used as the low and high bounds of the benchmarks. We exclude variable compensation (for example, bonuses) from benchmarks in roles that don’t receive commissions.
  • The 75th percentile gross equity value (in US dollar value) is used to back into a count of options (by dividing by our latest preferred stock valuation) for a given role and level.
• The bands are shared with each department lead, who has the ability to manually adjust bands where desired (for example, to interpolate where the data is rough or based on a low sample size, to create bands for roles that don’t have corresponding categories in Option Impact, to make adjustments for their particular hiring needs based on their experience, etc.).
• The Talent and People Ops teams review and sign off on the final approved numbers.

See Compensation change approvals for more.

How bands are changed

Bands are owned by each department lead. Bands can be changed by that individual with finance approval (to ensure team budgets reflect the change).

Proposed changes to bands should come with evidence of market changes (e.g. from benchmark data sources, candidate polling, etc.) and evidence that the existing bands are negatively affecting our hiring.

Making out-of-band offers

Bands are resources for hiring managers to use—they are not intended to be permanent or set in stone. Unique situations may exist where bands don’t make sense for various reasons, from lack of granularity for niche roles, to bad data.

Hiring managers that want to make offers outside of the 75th to 90th percentile cash compensation or outside of +/- 5% of the 75th percentile gross option value must receive approval from their department heads and the People Ops team.

While hiring managers have the ability to make an out-of-band offer actually in-band simply by changing the level that they hire someone at, we discourage using this tactic, as it can lead to misaligned expectations between the manager and the new teammate.

See Compensation change approvals for more.