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Silicon Valley Engineering

Talent Report
2020
 “How many backend engineers are there in
Silicon Valley?”
Recently one of our partners asked us what looks like a simple question – “How many backend engineers are
there in Silicon Valley?” The question appears simple yet actually hard to answer. Talking to several other
partners, it became clear others were interested in an answer. Why is it hard? There are not reliable data sources
that could tell you that.

One, it would require mapping all, or close to all, engineers out there. Two, and that is the hard part, most
wouldn’t be able to accurately tell you how many of them are backend. Some sources can identify who is an
“engineer”, some are decently accurately to know who is a “software engineer”, but anything deeper is woefully
inaccurate. But as a hiring manager, you’d want to know not just how many backend engineers there are, but also
how many of those (say) focus on infrastructure and have 3-5 years of relevant experience.

But that question is easy for us to answer, because we have built a talent graph of 3M software engineers in
North America and applied AI to deeply understand each person. From accurately identifying their primary role,
to what expertise they have, and what industry and company stage they would be most interested in.

So we put together this overview of software engineering talent in Silicon Valley.

 xxxk
Software Engineers in
San Francisco Bay Area
 By role type
• One of the achievements of our talent graph is
accurately identifying software engineer’s primary
Other role based on what we learn of person’s skills,
DBA
projects and deliverables.
Security
Data Scientist
• There is some double counting in this chart, as one
engineer could be in (say) both backend and full
Mobile Backend stack buckets. After all there are many engineers
whose experience spans multiple functional areas.
DevOps The depth of the experience also varies, so to
qualify to be counted for a specific role the engineer
must be able to pass an interview for such a role. A
simple example: backend eng who built one internal
Full Stack
dashboard wouldn’t qualify as a full stack engineer.
• Other is comprised of engineers who do not fall into
other big primary role categories, for examples sales
Frontend engineers. Also bundled here people whose there is
too little information to identify them accurately
QA Engineering
Manager

Note: the base for chart above is XXXk. Even though there are XXXk software engineers in the Bay Area, some engineers have multiple roles, leading to double counting, e.g. the same
person could have experience as both a full stack and a front end engineer.
 EM and DevOps skew older

Years of experience
All Engineers
Engineering Manager
DevOps

All Engineers

0-4 5-9 10-14 15-19 20+

• Engineering Managers obviously have more years of

experience
Data Scientists tend to be younger
All Engineers
0-4 5-9 10-14 15-19 20+ Data Scientist

• As expected, younger engineers is the biggest

category. Some of the factors contributing are the
growth of the tech sector and increasingly popularity
of tech (and software engineering) as the career
choice.
• The overall pattern somewhat holds when broken
0-4 5-9 10-14 15-19 20+
down by primary role, with a few exceptions.
• Data Scientist pool is heavily skewed towards
younger cadre, reflecting the rise of the demand of
data scientist with the advent of big data and AI.
Tenure

X yrs XX mo • Overall median tenure for an engineer

in Silicon Valley is X years and XX
Overall Median Tenure months. Median tenure for the first
job is almost the same at X years and X
months. But at the second job
Tenure (in months) engineers spend X months (XX%) less.
• Engineering managers and DBAs have
longest median tenures at X years x
months and X years X month,
respectively.
• Data Scientists, Frontend, Full Stack
and Mobile engineers have shortest
median tenures at X years.
1st Job 2nd Job 3rd Job 4th Job
Education
Top 10 schools by alumni among Silicon Valley
Engineers

X% 1.
2.
3.
University
University
University
% of engineers without college
education 4. University
• Silicon Valley has an image of being a 5. University
Mecca for self- taught hackers and 6. University
doers. The data appears to prove it 7. University
with almost XX% of engineers here 8. University
without a college degree. 9. University
• Of those that do have college degrees,
unsurprisingly 8/10 are California 10. University
schools. The other 2 are schools in
India.
International Education
Top 10 International Alma Mater are

XX% 1.
2.
University
University
% of engineers who studied 3. University
abroad for undergrads
4. University
5. University
• Bay Area is very international, and we can 6. University
see it from almost half of software 7. University
engineers receiving their undergraduate
education abroad. 8. University
• Biggest countries unsurprisingly are India 9. University
(XX%) and China (XX%). 10. University
• The next five are Canada (X%), Taiwan
(X%), UK (X%), Iran (X%) and South Korea
(X%).
Backend Engineers Summary

XXXk X yrs X mo $XXXk

# in Silicon Valley Median Tenure Avg Base Salary

By Years of Exp Backend

All Engineers

Backend

0-4 5-9 10-14 15-19 20+

Engineering Managers Summary

XXk X yrs Xmo $XXXk

# in Silicon Valley Median Tenure Avg Base Salary

By Years of Exp Engineering

All Engineers
Manager
Engineering Manager

0-4 5-9 10-14 15-19 20+

About Celential.ai
Celential is a startup in Silicon Valley that offers an AI-based recruiting
service that assists with sourcing, vetting and recruiting with a focus on
software engineers.

Celential’s deep talent graph includes 3M+ software engineers in North

America.