We've negotiated many Pinterest offers this year. Don't leave $100K+ on the table.
Pinterest is open to negotiating, but it's not easy to secure a large increase during a Pinterest negotiation. The company typically pays well from the onset and is less likely to lowball compared with companies like Google.
- Base Salary
- Pinterest Equity Package (see Pinterest's RSU vesting schedule below)
- Pinterest Signing Bonus (not included in all Pinterest offer packages and sometimes split over two years)
- Stock Refreshers
Pinterest doesn't offer cash bonuses. The company considered adding them 2 years ago but never followed through. Instead, they treat stock refreshers as a performance bonus.
One unique aspect about Pinterest compensation is that recruiters are much more forthcoming with Pinterest equity refresher grant targets. It's rare to receive those numbers from recruiters at most companies, but Pinterset will share a fairly accurate range and the refreshers targets are high.
Pinterest has remote, hybrid and office roles, which certainly gives employees lots of flexibility. For its remote roles, the pay differs on the basis of cost of living and market rates in your location. Another nice element is that there is a possibility to switch to fully remote at a later date if your manager is supportive.
Pinterest has remote, hybrid and office roles (as mentioned above). This means you often don't need to move for a role, but certain roles and teams may require you to move. In those situations, you should always push for a $10k+ relocation package and attempt to negotiate additional benefits like 2 months of corporate housing.
Pinterest’s most negotiable component is equity (though not nearly as much as it was in pre-IPO days), and the least negotiable component is base salary. Signing bonus is the second most important component to negotiate as Pinterest is known for relatively high signing bonuses (e.g. possible to get $75K+ at L5). It's worth noting that Pinterest has started splitting larger signing bonuses over 2 years.
They very rarely ask for written offers. However, expect to be asked about additional details regarding the competing offer such as location, offer breakdown, etc.
Pinterest has a hard time going above band, so you certainly shouldn't bank on it during a negotiation. In some situations, we have seen uplevel requests work at Pinterest to secure higher compensation.
Recruiters and managers at Pinterest have less control over offers because the company has a comp team. However, building good rapport with your hiring manager and recruiter is always helpful in a negotiation, as they will be able to advocate on your behalf.
The hiring process at Pinterest is different for every role. The hiring process for a software engineer typically has four stages: recruiter call, phone screen, onsite interview, and offer stage.
The recruiter call will give you a general overview of the role and the interview process.
The phone screen will be conducted with an engineer and will assess your general programming skills, specialized domain knowledge, and overall interests.
The onsite interview can have up to 5 separate rounds (multiple coding rounds, systems design, domain specific topics, interview with hiring manager).
Lastly, if you succeed and an offer is extended, this is where your Pinterest salary negotiation process will begin.
Let’s consider a Pinterest software engineer salary in 2021. The total compensation at Facebook for the same role is a little higher compared to Pinterest. For instance, a L5 software engineer at Facebook can get close to $500k, but at Pinterest the maximum compensation for that level is around $450k. Historically, Pinterest offers have a large equity component and its stock has been particularly volatile, which can result in big swings in total compensation.
While Pinterest's cash and equity components should be the main focus of your negotiation, Pinterest also offers great benefits. They of course provide health benefits (including vision and dental insurance), a retirement plan (401k and Roth 401k) and other miscellaneous perks (tuition reimbursement, phone bill reimbursement, wfh expense reimbursement, etc.)
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Equivalent Level at Google
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Our Clients Love Rora
Coming from a non-FAANG background, I was shocked to find out how much I could be earning. Before I signed up with Rora, I made the mistake of telling Amazon my current compensation. Thankfully, Rora knew exactly how to fix it and ended up getting me an offer that was 2.3X what I previously made and more than $600K higher than Amazon’s initial offer!
Through several weeks of interviews, Ganesh was always available to make sure I knew what to say for each conversation. I interviewed with start ups, Google, Facebook and Amazon and was really impressed that Rora knew the comp ranges and were able to give me tailored advice for each – even the start ups.
There ended up being two particularly complex moments in my negotiation. One of the start-ups I had a personal relationship with and I wasn’t sure how it would affect the negotiation. I like that there was a focus on my individual circumstances and that they were leveraged to get me a higher offer. The other situation is that Amazon made a mistake on my written offer and initially wouldn’t rectify it. Ganesh was able to guide me through a challenging conversation to get it resolved.
Thanks to Wilson and the team at Rora I got a ~$250K increase on my remote Facebook offer! I was initially worried I wouldn’t have much leverage because Facebook reached out to me, and I wasn’t interviewing anywhere else. Rora introduced me to an Amazon L7 recruiter and helped me get that process started. I didn’t even end up needing to finish the Amazon interviews, since we were able to use some early compensation conversations to justify our numbers to Facebook.
At one point I was also considering pushing for an E7 role, and they wrote up a great script for me to broach the subject with my recruiter. She ended up giving me the option to do an additional interview to be considered for the higher-level position.
The whole process was very smooth, and I wouldn’t hesitate to use the service for any future negotiations. I found the regular calls with Wilson where we walked through strategy and discussed the scripts to be extremely helpful. Not only did it help with this negotiation, but I also learned a lot of useful negotiation tactics that I’ve already started to use in other situations.
As an engineering leader with decades of experience and having now gone through the negotiation with the team at Rora, the only thing I can say is — get the help. Whether you realize you need it, or even if you think you don’t. Just because you have done well in engineering doesn't mean that you understand the tactics and limits of the recruiting process.
Rora helped me get a $200K increase on my original Facebook offer without any competing offers. It was clear that Rora was deeply familiar with Facebook's negotiation playbook. I’d honestly give the experience an 11/10.
In addition, Rora guided me on how to get the position switched to a revised remote role which was a huge deal at a personal level. They showed me how to redirect FB’s questions so that I could explore the possibility of not relocating, without ever having to say no to my original offer.
This is my first FAANG role and I'm so happy I worked with Rora (thanks again Annie!) for the negotiation. My goal was to increase my Google offer, but I was in a tricky situation where I only had 1 other interview (no offer yet) at a small startup. With their guidance, I managed to get a $240K increase on my Google offer, despite Google's policy of requiring cross offers in writing to justify an increase.
The mock negotiations were a big part of why I was able to get this increase. Going into the negotiation, I assumed the key factor was what to say but I quickly learned that how you say it is equally if not more important. This was clear when over the course of the call"no" turned into "I'll see what I can do" and eventually"I think we can make this work". A big part of this was also having someone with me on the calls to provide real time guidance. This took a lot of the stress out of the situation. I can't recommend this team highly enough!
After receiving several job offers, I needed to make a decision within a few days. I wanted to make sure I was getting the best offer possible, so I decided to use Rora. I was very pleased with their service. My coach, Sameer, was well prepared and had information about what compensation increases were likely possible. He provided detailed scripts covering a range of scenarios, and he did practice negotiations with me that helped me feel confident when I had the actual conversations.
With his help I was able to increase one offer by $45k per year plus get a $50k signing bonus and then use that to increase my offer from Square, which was my first choice. All throughout he was very responsive as I was dealing with some tight deadlines and looking to wrap things up quickly. Rora's fee was only a tiny fraction of the increase they helped me negotiate, and even though they would have made more money if I had taken the highest offer, Sameer always put my goals first and never pressured me to do so. I highly recommend Rora!
My friend introduced me to Rora and I’m so glad they did. I initially did some calculations to see if working with them would be worth it - my final increase ended up being ~3x higher than what I had estimated to be possible!
Their data is much more accurate than anything I found online. Without Sameer's guidance, I would have never known (and would have probably been too nervous) to ask for >$800K for anAmazon L7 offer. Of course, it's not just not enough to throw out a big number, you also need to be able to justify it. Sameer guided me through negotiating an up-level at another company, which I didn’t even know was possible at my level. With their scripts, I was able to leverage my competing offer to get exec approval for my Amazon offer. They also knew all the tricks Amazon would play (e.g., assuming 15% stock appreciation) and exactly how to counter them.
My total 4-year compensation increased by $570K. I don't think I've ever had a higher ROI – I’m very thankful that this service exists!
has a unique set of negotiation policies. If you don’t have experience negotiating with them, you risk losing out on large amounts of money because of very small mistakes.
There are many of these rules you need to know to get the highest
offer possible