Levels.fyi

Levels.fyi is a compensation data platform founded in 2017 by Zuhayeer Musa and Zaheer Mohiuddin that allows technology workers to compare salaries and career levels across companies.¹ The platform collects crowdsourced and verified compensation data from employees, covering base salary, stock grants, and bonuses broken down by company, job title, experience level, and location.⁶ As of 2026, Levels.fyi serves over 3 million professionals per month and contains more than one million individual compensation data points.⁶⁸ The company is headquartered in Cupertino, California, employs a team of approximately 30 people, and is a portfolio company of Founders, Inc.⁸¹⁶

Origin and founding

Levels.fyi originated from a problem Zaheer Mohiuddin encountered in 2017 when he was leaving LinkedIn for a position at Amazon.⁴ Mohiuddin had been promoted quickly at LinkedIn and wanted to confirm that a new employer would not reclassify him at a lower seniority level, a practice known in the industry as "downleveling."² He discussed the issue with his friend Zuhayeer Musa, who was about to graduate from UC Berkeley, and the two discovered that the same question appeared repeatedly on forums like Blind: how does a given level at one tech company translate to another company's system?⁵³

The pair built a static HTML website that mapped engineering career levels between major tech firms, sourcing the initial data from forums, Q&A sites, and friends who shared their companies' internal leveling guidelines.⁵ They used Google Forms for submissions and Google Sheets as the data store, hosted the site on AWS S3, and kept infrastructure costs below the price of a cup of coffee per year.⁵¹¹ To seed initial traffic, Musa and Mohiuddin answered leveling questions on Blind and other Q&A platforms, linking back to the site.⁵ Within days, users began sharing the site organically, and the domain name -- the .fyi top-level domain made it easy to remember and spread by word of mouth.⁵

By 2018, the site was generating roughly $5,000 per month through a referral partnership with Triplebyte, a technical recruiting platform, which paid Levels.fyi a commission for each hire.⁵ Mohiuddin recounted to Business Insider that while he was still employed at Amazon, he overheard a stranger at a lunch table recommend Levels.fyi to a colleague, which convinced him the project warranted full-time attention.² Both founders left their jobs in 2019 to work on the company full-time, and the business was profitable from the start without raising venture capital.²

Product and data

The site's original feature was a leveling comparison chart showing how seniority tiers at one company correspond to those at another -- for example, mapping a Google L3 engineer to the equivalent Microsoft level 59 role.¹³ As requests for more granular data arrived, the founders expanded to crowdsourced salary information, eventually collecting verified compensation figures including base pay, equity vesting schedules, and bonuses.³¹

Levels.fyi differentiates its data from competitors like Glassdoor by verifying a portion of submissions through uploaded offer letters, W-2 tax forms, and screenshots of internal pay portals.¹² As of 2021, Business Insider reported that approximately 95% of the salary data was crowdsourced from current employees, with verification applied through those document uploads.² The platform states that it never accepts payment to adjust leveling or salary figures.⁶

The initial architecture remained remarkably minimal for its scale. Through early 2023, the site ran without a traditional backend database: Google Forms collected user submissions, Google Sheets stored the data, and AWS Lambda functions served it through API Gateway.¹¹ In January 2024, the team migrated to a Postgres database while continuing to use Google Sheets in daily operations.¹¹ As of early 2023, roughly 1 to 2 million unique visitors used the site monthly.¹¹

Beyond raw salary data, the site now includes a salary heatmap, compensation calculator, benefits comparison tool, chart visualizations, internship salary data, H-1B salary data, and a job board.⁶ Users can browse compensation by location, company, job title, or industry.⁶ The platform publishes an annual End of Year Pay Report: the 2025 edition drew on more than 245,000 data points across 5,000 companies and 150 job titles, reporting a median total compensation growth of 3.49% year-over-year for U.S. software engineers.⁹

Negotiation and career services

Levels.fyi launched a salary negotiation service that pairs job seekers with former recruiters from companies such as Google, Amazon, and Salesforce for one-on-one coaching through the offer and negotiation process.¹² Users book an initial 30-minute session, receive follow-up calls, and get email support with draft counteroffers and strategy.³ As of mid-2021, the company reported it had negotiated $31 million in total compensation on behalf of clients.¹ By July 2021, that figure had grown to $75 million after less than a year of offering the service.⁴ As of 2026, the reviews page states the team has negotiated over $100 million in increases across thousands of offers.⁷

The founders described the negotiation service as a feedback loop: each client engagement produces a verified salary data point that improves the platform's database, which in turn helps other users research fair compensation.² The 2025 annual report highlighted the largest single negotiation win of the year at $1.5 million in additional total compensation over four years, equaling a $375,000 annual increase.⁹

In addition to negotiation coaching, the company offers resume review services for job seekers and has developed a mobile app.⁸ The company also created a standardized leveling system, the Levels.fyi Software Engineer Leveling Standard, which abstracts company-specific level names into a common hierarchy to make cross-company salary comparisons easier.¹⁰

Business model and employer offerings

Levels.fyi generates revenue from multiple streams. On the consumer side, the company charges for negotiation coaching sessions and resume reviews.² On the enterprise side, the company sells compensation benchmarking data to employers in spreadsheet format, allowing HR departments and compensation analysts to plug the data into their internal tools.¹⁴ Zaheer Mohiuddin explained on Hacker News in 2022 that the employer data offering provides the same information visible on the public site but formatted with additional filtering criteria such as metro codes.¹⁴ He noted that the primary buyers were HR managers and compensation analysts who used the data to justify paying employees more internally, replacing stale surveys from traditional providers like Radford and Mercer.¹⁴

When the employer data product surfaced on Hacker News in April 2022, some users questioned the alignment of selling data to both employers and employees.¹⁴ Mohiuddin responded that the data was already publicly available on the site and that the paid offering was essentially a convenience format, not exclusive information.¹⁴ He emphasized that the majority of the company's revenue at that time came directly from individual professionals.¹⁴

In October 2020, Levels.fyi announced a partnership with Pequity, a compensation management software company, allowing Levels.fyi clients to import its real-time market data directly into Pequity's platform.¹⁵ The company also offers an interactive offers product for employers, which lets companies present compensation packages in a visual format that candidates can explore, and an API for programmatic data access.⁶ The company also earns revenue from job postings on its job board.²

Gender pay gap reporting

Levels.fyi publishes periodic gender pay gap reports using its compensation dataset. The company released its first U.S. gender pay gap report in 2020, and the Q1 2024 edition analyzed 17,116 gendered data points from software engineers in the United States.¹² Roughly one in six submissions in the dataset came from women, below the 24% representation of women in U.S. STEM fields reported by MIT.¹²

The reports normalize compensation by career level, which the company argues provides a more accurate picture of the gap than raw aggregate numbers.¹² The Q1 2024 analysis found that at lower levels, women in some cases out-earned men, but the gap widened at higher seniority levels -- a pattern consistent with the 2020 findings.¹² In the San Francisco Bay Area, a disparity appeared from entry level, narrowed at mid-career, then widened again at senior levels; in Seattle and New York, the largest disparity was at the level immediately above entry.¹² Musa told The Ladders in 2021 that the company's data showed women earned less than men at each normalized level, and that the gap compounded at higher levels.⁴

Academic use

Levels.fyi's dataset has been used in academic economics research. A 2025 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, authored by Zoe Cullen and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson, studied the effects of salary negotiations using data from a large sample of Levels.fyi users.¹³ The paper thanked Hashir Baqai, Zaheer Mohiuddin, Zuhayeer Musa, and Brian Nguyen for their assistance and acknowledged Levels.fyi for granting access to its data.¹³ The company also offers a dedicated academic research dataset through its compensation data offerings page.⁶

Community

The platform includes a community discussion forum where users can post anonymously or under pseudonymous identities, verified by employment status.⁴ Musa described the community feature in 2021 as a space where people could exchange information and help each other with career questions directly on the site.⁴ The forum functions as a discussion space for topics including offer evaluations, interview experiences, career transitions, and compensation comparisons, occupying a similar niche to the anonymous workplace forum Blind, where the founders first identified the demand for leveling data.⁵