Start with the work, location and pay period

Compare roles that involve similar responsibility before comparing numbers. A title can conceal differences in team leadership, production ownership, research expectations or hardware specialization. Read the responsibilities and requirements, then note the work location, remote eligibility and employment arrangement. A salary range for one location may not apply elsewhere.

Identify the currency and period in the source wording. An hourly internship rate is not interchangeable with an annual staff salary. Converting hourly pay into annual pay requires assumptions about paid hours, weeks, overtime and benefits. Our explorer keeps explicit annual, explicit hourly and unspecified periods separate. It does not silently multiply a rate by a standard work year.

What our salary explorer actually measures

The explorer extracts disclosed dollar ranges from current employer job descriptions and requires explicit USD or US-pay context, or structured USD salary fields from the employer’s recruitment platform. It records the surrounding source wording and links to the full listing. A conservative extraction can miss a valid disclosure or require interpretation; the employer remains the authoritative source. Unknown pay periods stay labeled as unknown.

Where enough comparable observations exist, the explorer calculates the median of advertised range midpoints for jobs with one explicit annual USD band. Each job contributes once. The aggregate appears only with at least ten jobs across three employers. These are transparency rules for a small sample, not a statistical guarantee that it represents the market. Multiple source bands for a single job are shown individually and excluded from that midpoint calculation.

Why an advertised midpoint is not a market salary

A midpoint is arithmetic: a range of $120,000 to $180,000 has a midpoint of $150,000. That does not tell us the employer’s target offer, the distribution of employee earnings or where a specific applicant would fall. Combining several midpoints does not turn them into verified employee compensation.

Our sample covers the employers we import and the roles that disclose pay in a form we can parse. It can overrepresent particular geographies, companies and seniority levels. Jobs that do not publish a range are absent from the pay sample. A filter with only a few observations is a reason to inspect individual listings, not a reason to publish a confident industry average. Public occupational statistics can provide broader context, but their occupation definitions and survey periods differ from this live robotics job sample.

Separate base pay, bonus, equity and practical costs

Read whether a disclosure describes base salary or broader compensation. Ask how any bonus is determined, whether equity is offered and what vesting or liquidity conditions apply. Do not add an estimated equity value to salary and present the result as guaranteed cash. Benefits and relocation terms may matter, but they need their own comparison.

Also compare the practical arrangement: expected hours, travel, on-site requirements, location, leave and employment type. A higher headline range may accompany a different scope or cost structure. For an offer, ask the recruiter which location and level the range applies to and which parts of the compensation are guaranteed. Keep the response in writing where practical.

  • What is the currency, pay period and applicable location?
  • Is this base pay, total cash or a broader compensation figure?
  • Which level and responsibilities does the range cover?
  • How are bonus and equity determined, and what is conditional?
  • Which benefits, travel and relocation terms apply to this role?

Use the evidence to prepare a better conversation

Select a small set of genuinely comparable vacancies and save their source links and review dates. Write down where each comparison differs from your target role. Then connect your own evidence to the responsibilities: the subsystem you owned, the result you measured and the complexity you handled. A list of unrelated top-end ranges is less persuasive than a clear comparison.

Use the live explorer to ask better questions, not to predict an offer. The data changes when employers update or close roles; it is not a historical salary database. We do not collect workers’ private salary submissions. If a disclosure is unclear, confirm it with the employer rather than treating an extracted number as a promise.