Tech Salaries in New York 2026: The Complete Breakdown
Wall Street meets Silicon Alley - what every tech role pays in the most competitive market on earth
New York is not a secondary tech market. It is the most diverse tech ecosystem in the world - and increasingly, one of the highest-paying.
What makes NYC unique is not just Big Tech. It is the collision of industries. Wall Street quant funds pay engineers like they pay traders. Media companies need ML engineers to build recommendation systems. Healthcare startups need backend engineers to handle HIPAA-compliant infrastructure. Fashion brands need data scientists to optimize supply chains. No other city offers this breadth of employer types, each competing for the same engineering talent.
The result: salaries that rival San Francisco and Seattle, with career optionality that neither can match.
Here is what every major tech role actually pays in New York in 2026.
ML Engineer - $135K-$220K+
Machine learning engineers in New York earn among the highest salaries in the city, driven by demand from both Big Tech AI teams and quantitative finance firms. Salary range: $135K-$220K+ Median: ~$170KNew York's ML engineer market is split into two worlds. Big Tech offices (Google, Meta, Amazon) pay competitively with their Bay Area counterparts, typically $150K-$200K base with significant stock grants. Hedge funds and trading firms (Two Sigma, Citadel, DE Shaw, Renaissance) pay even more - $180K-$250K+ base with cash bonuses that can double total compensation.
Applied ML roles are particularly valued: recommendation engines for media companies, fraud detection for fintech, NLP for legal tech, and time-series forecasting for financial firms. Engineers who can bridge ML research and production systems command premium compensation regardless of industry.
The AI talent war in NYC has intensified since 2024. OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI labs have expanded their NYC presence, adding another layer of competition for ML talent.
Security Engineer - $120K-$210K
Security engineers in New York benefit from the city's concentration of financial institutions, all of which face stringent regulatory requirements and sophisticated threat landscapes. Salary range: $120K-$210K Median: ~$160KFinancial services firms are the largest employers of security engineers in NYC. Banks like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley maintain massive security teams covering everything from application security to threat intelligence to compliance automation. These roles pay well because the cost of a breach is existential - regulatory fines, customer trust, and market position are all at stake.
Beyond finance, NYC's growing healthtech and fintech sectors need security engineers who understand both compliance frameworks (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS) and modern cloud security. Engineers with experience in zero-trust architecture, cloud security posture management, and security automation earn at the top of the range.
Cloud Architect - $130K-$215K
Cloud architects in New York are in high demand as traditional enterprises - particularly financial institutions and media companies - accelerate their cloud migrations. Salary range: $130K-$215K Median: ~$165KUnlike Seattle (where cloud demand is driven by AWS and Azure themselves), NYC's cloud architect market is driven by cloud consumers. Banks migrating critical workloads, media companies building streaming infrastructure, and retail companies scaling e-commerce platforms all need architects who can design multi-cloud, compliant, highly available systems.
The regulatory overlay adds complexity and value. Cloud architects in financial services must navigate data residency requirements, audit trails, and disaster recovery mandates that do not exist in other industries. This specialization commands a salary premium of 10-20% over equivalent roles in less regulated sectors.
Data Scientist - $120K-$200K
Data scientists in New York work across an unusually broad range of industries, from quantitative finance to advertising to healthcare - each with distinct compensation structures. Salary range: $120K-$200K Median: ~$155KThe highest-paid data scientists in NYC work in quantitative finance. Firms like Two Sigma, Citadel, and DE Shaw hire data scientists with strong statistical backgrounds to build trading signals, risk models, and portfolio optimization systems. These roles often require PhDs and pay $180K-$250K+ in base salary alone.
Outside finance, data scientists at media companies (NYT, Condé Nast, Spotify NYC), adtech firms, and e-commerce companies earn $130K-$175K. The key differentiator is engineering capability - data scientists who can deploy their own models to production, write efficient SQL, and build automated pipelines earn significantly more than those focused purely on analysis and Jupyter notebooks.
NYC's data science market rewards specialization. Causal inference for A/B testing, time-series forecasting for finance, and NLP for legal/media applications are particularly well-compensated niches.
Backend Engineer - $115K-$200K
Backend engineers in New York build systems that handle some of the most demanding performance requirements in tech - particularly in financial services where microseconds matter. Salary range: $115K-$200K Median: ~$155KThe backend engineering market in NYC is shaped by Wall Street. Trading firms need engineers who can build low-latency systems in Java, C++, or Rust that process millions of transactions per second. These roles pay at the very top of the range - $180K-$220K+ base - and require deep systems programming knowledge that most software engineers never develop.
Beyond finance, NYC's backend market is broad: API platforms for fintech companies, content delivery systems for media, HIPAA-compliant infrastructure for healthtech, and scalable e-commerce backends for retail. The common thread is that NYC companies tend to operate at scale and under regulatory constraints, which means backend engineers here develop skills that are not easily replicated.
Mid-level backend engineers with 3-5 years of experience and distributed systems knowledge typically earn $140K-$170K. Senior engineers with expertise in high-throughput, fault-tolerant systems push above $190K.
Software Engineer - $110K-$195K
Software engineers in New York have the broadest range of employer options of any US city - from FAANG offices to Wall Street to startups to media conglomerates. Salary range: $110K-$195K Median: ~$150KGoogle's NYC office is one of its largest outside Mountain View. Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft all maintain significant NYC engineering teams. These offices pay on par with their Bay Area counterparts - $130K-$195K base for mid-to-senior engineers, with total comp packages of $200K-$350K+.
New York's unique advantage is the startup ecosystem. Thousands of venture-backed startups across fintech (Ramp, Brex, Plaid), healthtech (Ro, Oscar), and enterprise software (Datadog, MongoDB) offer competitive base salaries plus meaningful equity. For engineers willing to take startup risk, the upside potential in NYC rivals Silicon Valley.
New grad software engineers start at $100K-$130K at major companies. The path from junior to senior is well-defined at large companies, with clear leveling systems and compensation bands.
Product Manager - $125K-$200K
Product managers in New York operate at the intersection of technology and business strategy, with the city's diverse industry base creating PM roles that do not exist elsewhere. Salary range: $125K-$200K Median: ~$155KWhat distinguishes NYC product management is industry diversity. A PM at Bloomberg builds financial data products. A PM at the New York Times builds subscriber engagement features. A PM at Oscar Health builds insurance workflows. A PM at Ramp builds expense management. Each requires domain expertise that creates specialization moats and commands premium compensation.
Technical PMs - those who can read code, design APIs, and work directly with engineering teams - earn at the top of the range. PMs with MBA backgrounds from top programs plus pre-MBA engineering experience are particularly valued in NYC, where the finance-to-tech pipeline runs strong.
Senior PMs and Directors of Product at growth-stage startups earn $180K-$220K+ with significant equity, while equivalent roles at FAANG companies offer $200K-$350K+ in total compensation.
DevOps Engineer - $120K-$190K
DevOps engineers in New York work in environments where uptime requirements are extreme - particularly in financial services, where system outages have direct monetary consequences measured in millions per minute. Salary range: $120K-$190K Median: ~$150KFinancial institutions set the bar for DevOps in NYC. Banks need infrastructure that meets regulatory uptime requirements, disaster recovery mandates, and audit compliance - all while supporting rapid feature deployment. This means NYC DevOps engineers develop expertise in areas like blue-green deployments under compliance constraints, infrastructure-as-code with audit trails, and multi-region failover architectures.
Platform engineering roles - building internal developer platforms that abstract away infrastructure complexity - command the highest salaries. Engineers with Kubernetes, Terraform, and observability stack expertise (Datadog, which is headquartered in NYC, is a major employer) earn $160K-$190K+.
Frontend Engineer - $105K-$185K
Frontend engineers in New York work on some of the most visible and high-traffic consumer products in the world - from media platforms to financial dashboards to e-commerce. Salary range: $105K-$185K Median: ~$140KNYC's media industry creates unique frontend opportunities. The New York Times, Bloomberg, Condé Nast, and Spotify all have NYC-based engineering teams building content-rich, performance-critical web applications. These roles require expertise in SSR/SSG, web performance optimization, and accessible design - skills that command premium salaries.
Financial services dashboards are another high-paying niche. Bloomberg Terminal's web components, trading platform UIs, and portfolio analytics tools require engineers who can handle real-time data visualization, WebSocket connections, and complex state management. These roles pay 10-20% above typical frontend salaries.
React and TypeScript dominate the NYC frontend stack, with Next.js adoption growing rapidly across startups and media companies. Engineers with design systems experience or web performance expertise are particularly scarce.
Data Engineer - $115K-$190K
Data engineers in New York build the pipelines that feed trading algorithms, recommendation engines, advertising platforms, and enterprise analytics systems. Salary range: $115K-$190K Median: ~$148KFinance drives the top end of data engineering compensation in NYC. Trading firms need real-time data pipelines with microsecond reliability. Banks need data warehouses that comply with regulatory reporting requirements. Fintech companies need event-driven architectures that process millions of transactions.
Outside finance, media and advertising companies are major employers. Building data pipelines for ad targeting, content recommendation, and audience analytics requires engineers who can work with streaming data at scale using tools like Kafka, Spark, Flink, and dbt.
Data engineers with experience in real-time streaming architectures, data mesh/lakehouse patterns, or ML feature stores earn at the top of the range. The line between data engineering and ML engineering continues to blur in NYC, where data engineers increasingly build the infrastructure that ML models depend on.
Full Stack Developer - $105K-$185K
Full stack developers in New York are particularly valued at startups and growth-stage companies, where the ability to ship across the entire stack is more important than deep specialization. Salary range: $105K-$185K Median: ~$140KNYC's startup ecosystem is the primary employer of full stack developers. Companies building MVPs and scaling products need engineers who can implement a React frontend, build a Node.js or Python API, set up a database, deploy to cloud infrastructure, and iterate quickly based on user feedback. This versatility commands competitive compensation, especially at early-stage companies where a single engineer might own an entire product surface.
At larger companies, full stack roles tend to skew toward one end (frontend-heavy or backend-heavy), with the other stack serving as a secondary skill. Total compensation at growth-stage startups typically includes meaningful equity alongside $130K-$170K base salaries.
Why New York Pays What It Does
Three forces shape NYC tech compensation:
Industry collision. No other city has Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Broadway, world-class hospitals, and a massive tech ecosystem competing for the same engineers. This cross-industry demand creates a salary floor that purely tech-focused cities cannot match. When a hedge fund offers $300K for a backend engineer, every startup and Big Tech office in the city must respond. Density and optionality. Within a subway ride, an engineer can interview at Google, JPMorgan, a Series A startup, the New York Times, and a healthcare company. This optionality gives engineers leverage - and employers know it. Retention requires competitive compensation because the switching cost is near zero. Cost of living as a filter. Manhattan rent is among the highest in the world. Companies know this and price it into compensation. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: only well-funded companies can afford to hire in NYC, and those companies pay well because they can afford to.New York vs Other Tech Hubs
| Factor | New York | San Francisco | Seattle | Austin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Senior engineer salary | $165K-$200K | $180K-$220K | $170K-$200K | $140K-$175K |
| State + local income tax | 7-12% | 9-13% | 0% | 0% |
| Median 2BR rent | $3,800 | $4,200 | $3,200 | $2,200 |
| Industry diversity | Highest | High (tech-heavy) | Medium (tech-heavy) | Medium |
| Finance crossover | Dominant | Low | Low | Low |
New York does not win on raw take-home pay - Seattle has no state tax and lower rent. Where NYC wins is career optionality and ceiling. The path from Big Tech to hedge fund to startup CTO exists in New York in a way it does not anywhere else. For engineers who value career flexibility and diverse experience over optimizing year-one take-home, NYC is hard to beat.
The Bottom Line
New York is where tech meets everything else. The salaries reflect not just demand from tech companies, but competition from finance, media, healthcare, and every other industry that now depends on software engineers.
If you are evaluating an offer in NYC or planning a move, benchmark your specific role against our salary data:
Or see how New York stacks up globally in our highest paying tech jobs ranking, compare against Seattle salaries to see the tax trade-offs, check San Francisco for the highest raw salary numbers in tech, see how Austin compares with zero state tax, or see how Toronto compares north of the border.
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