Top engineering talent at Twitter draws $10-mn pay

Christopher Fry, senior vice president of engineering at Twitter is amongst the company's highest-paid executives. He drew $10.3 million last year, just behind Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo's $11.5 million, Twitter's IPO documents show.

The figure exceeded the paychecks of executives such as chief technology officer Adam Messinger, chief financial officer Mike Gupta and chief operating officer Ali Rowghani, Reuters said in a report.

Thanks to a shortage of top engineering talent even amidst the exponential increase in the capital-backed start-ups packages are getting heftier.

The news agency quoted Iain Grant, a recruiter at Riviera Partners specialising in placing engineers at venture-capital backed start-ups as saying, the number of A-players in Silicon Valley had not grown, but the demand for them had gone through the roof.

There are plenty of stories about the lengths to which employers would go to attract engineering talent - in addition to the free cafeterias, laundry services and shuttle buses that the Googles and Facebooks of the world were famous for already.

A start-up offered a coveted engineer a year's lease on a Tesla sedan, which cost around $1,000 a month, according to venture capitalist Venky Ganesan.

In the case of Fry, his compensation came mostly in the form of stock awards, valued last year at $10.1 million, Twitter's IPO documents registered with securities regulators show, with a salary of $145,513 and a bonus of $100,000.

That was less than Facebook Inc's VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer's $24.4 million in stock awards the year before the social network's 2012 initial public offering, in addition to a salary of $270,833 and a bonus of $140,344. However Facebook that year posted revenue of $3.71 billion, 10 times more than Twitter's $317 million, that year.

According to Grant, over three-quarters of candidates who took VP of engineering roles at his client companies over the last two years drew total cash compensation in excess of $250,000. He added, many also received equity grants totaling 1 to 2 per cent of the company.

The huge demand for engineers was partly driven by a growing number of start-ups, according to venture capitalists.

Around 242 Bay Area companies received early-stage funding - known as a seed round - in the first half of this year, consultancy CB Insights said, which was more than the number for all of 2010.

Another factor was the increasing complexity of technology with much talk focused on the lore of the ''10x'' engineer who as a person was so talented, that he or she did the work of 10 merely competent engineers.