That jumped out at me too. They want an experienced "full-stack" ME/EE with strong knowledge in multiple areas of physics for a very speculative attempt to essentially create a new kind of manufacturing by custom-building all the hardware, and their salary range starts is $100k-170k in San Francisco? That seems a bit low for a unicorn candidate, especially given what they're going to have to spend on the hardware itself.
The people they'll attract with that job description are already wealthy, likely semi-retired and looking for something to do. They won't care about the salary. They will cause headaches for the bookkeepers by forgetting to deposit their paychecks.
If this leads to a startup with a parking lot full of Porsches, well, that's not such a great sign, having BTDT. You want lean and hungry people at a lean and hungry company. People with something at stake -- if only their pride -- and something to prove. Not people who were "10x performers" at their former startup and are now, post-exit, convinced of their own intellectual immortality.
IMO they're better off hiring engineers like everybody else does, by paying market compensation.
Assuming 170k is what they’d pay people who actually meet all those requirements and 100k is for new grads (eg someone with an MS or PhD that exposed them to the “full stack”), it seems reasonable as a salary, considering they are paying equity as well, and may include bonuses.
170k is a pretty normal senior SWE salary for Bay Area startups or even FAANGS. The crazy TCs come from equity and, to a lesser extent, bonuses.
I've had two jobs at pre-Series A startups in Houston with salaries near the low end of that range. A higher-profile, more capital-intensive SV startup looking for someone with a very broad skillset ought to be able to pay more, shouldn't it?
Thats a better and more nuanced opinion than my own - I went from EE to CE because I wanted an easier path to working as a SWE after I heard about my prospects at Intel or Boeing or really as a hardware engineer in general.
Question though - if your salary was at the low end of that range why does this seem too low? What would seem like enough? Im assuming those jobs were in related fields and that you would have a stronger impression of what would be attractive for a person in that position than I would
I'm more of a firmware guy, myself, although I've done some PCB design and a fair bit of hardware debugging. My startup experience has been in the oil industry at companies with fewer than 5 people.
I don't have actual data backing me up. It seems low to me because I have gotten the following impressions, some of which may be wrong:
* San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world.
* Startups in Silicon Valley routinely receive tens of millions of dollars in funding despite having questionable business plans, conflicts of interest, and mentally-unstable founders.
* Even SWEs who just graduated from college can get upwards of $150k/year at major tech companies, even if they spend most of their time just copying and pasting from Stack Overflow.
* Good electronics engineers are rarer than good SWEs. Good electronics engineers who can also design high-precision machines are extremely rare, and the ones with semiconductor experience are probably earning big salaries at large companies.
* Hardware development is much more expensive than software development. In particular, hardware design errors can be much more expensive to fix.
* Getting a new manufacturing process up and running is a lengthy and capital-intensive task. Creating a totally new kind of manufacturing process to "disrupt" an established, competitive industry could charitably be described as "high-risk".
* Hardware startups rarely make it big, and the ones that do seem to be associated with trendy software stuff like crypto, AI, and quantum computing.
To summarize, a startup that's going to be spending a lot of money on hardware development in a very expensive city wants an experienced engineer with a specific and unusually-large skillset, and they're offering a salary that barely competes with an entry-level SWE job along with some high-risk stock options.
As another comment said, it sounds like they want someone who will treat this as more of a hobby than a job. Which is fine, but I feel like the proper job title for that is "independently-wealthy cofounder", not "hardware engineer". (Alternately, I've heard that highly-specific job offers can be used as an excuse to get an H-1B visa -- maybe they're looking to hire someone from Taiwan. Or maybe I'm just being cynical.)
