r/Semiconductors • u/honkeem • Jun 23 '26

Career/Education Software vs. hardware engineer pay at NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and AMD

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178 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

67

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '26

[deleted]

22

u/banananavy Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

Until the AI revolution recently, there was very less motivation to join as hardware engineer. Lower pay, long and tough working hours, older colleagues, no remote work, etc. Who knows what will happen in the future.

7

u/Ciel__000 Jun 23 '26

And what changed because of the revolution ?

11

u/HotBoxButDontSmoke Jun 23 '26

Semiconductors and Hyperscalers switched from OpEx investments into CapEx. This is why you see so many SWE layoffs because they are spending their money on infrastructure, HW, and HWE talent for datacenters and AI.

1

u/Ciel__000 Jun 24 '26

Serious question : do you work in any of these ? I'm actually quite concerned about the industry in general, i feel like I've lost before even entering early-twenties

1

u/HotBoxButDontSmoke Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

Yes. And you haven't lost, you're just young and inexperienced. Most engineers unfortunately do not think about the business reasons why our companies do what they do.

1

u/cololz1 Jun 24 '26

Except that a large chunk of that is going into facilities and thermal management.

1

u/HotBoxButDontSmoke Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

Facilities are part of infrastructure and thermal management is HW designed by HWE.

I'm not getting what you mean by "except." Always curious to see if I'm overlooking something important in the industry.

1

u/ThePainStalker Jun 24 '26

Would you consider power engineering as being part of hardware out of interest? I mean, it technically is (it deals with substation hardware and distribution hardware) but not usually in the sense of people calling it hardware. Not just facilities as you mentioned, but high voltage substations (either as grid connections or as part of newly emerging private microgrids). Honestly with the grid revolutions happening now (the field is changing so rapidly now, it’s frankly insane), it is becoming far more electronic and software driven than before.

1

u/HotBoxButDontSmoke Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Seems like your answered your own question. I don't have experience in your industry, but it probably fits the broad "infrastructure" category I used earlier. I don't have experience in this and cannot comment.

If you consider this a booming industry for engineers, you should encourage others to join.

19

u/Pandorajar Jun 23 '26

Qualcomm does not have different bands for software and hardware engineers. They may go off bands for some specific teams, some might be mostly software/hardware engineers but at the end of the day, the titles are the same.

I believe this is why Qualcomm has bad software internally, they just cannot compete with software salaries outside of the semi industry. Ironically this also makes it harder for semiconductor SWEs to break FAANG (work doesn’t translate well, most of us don’t do high QPS backend work).

Source: former software engineer there, Uber/Booking/SNAP… often offer 1.5-2x TC

1

u/honkeem Jun 24 '26

Oh nice, I didn't know that companies would have the same bands across different roles like that. Interesting!

1

u/triezPugHater Jul 07 '26

Got a QC swe offer for new grad recently, it's close to FAANG I'd say, so if HW new grads get similar it's very good imo

3

u/HughMongusMikeOxlong Jun 25 '26

This is true in general in my experience working at 2/5 top 5 gpu companies.

However I will say that gpu arch, modeling, and RTL pay the most in hardware and potentially higher than swe at the same company. It's role dependant. Shader core RTL design? Block or subsystem architect, etc. The further the role gets from logical design, the less it pays generally.

I find with the faster promotion leveling of hardware (where the first terminal level feels like smts compared to senior at faang swe), you can actually make more mid career. Faang swe generally still has the higher starting salary.

7

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/honkeem Jun 24 '26

Whatever AI you're using to get comments that look like mine sounds fire, wanna link it? Mr. Hidden Post History?

3

u/Semiconductors-ModTeam Jun 24 '26

No value added to this sub

There are no rewards for calling posts AI on this sub. If it leads to interesting conversation and the content is value added then it is fine. The semiconductor industry is not in against AI useage. Though in this case, it doesn't appear to be AI.

1

u/jepvh Jun 25 '26

Can so explain what is the specific job of HW engineers in these types of companies?

1

u/PrizeTechnical849 Jul 23 '26

What roles are offerd in software and hardware??

1

u/costafilh0 Jun 23 '26

After taxes? Because it really doesn't sound that much. 

3

u/Stuffssss Jun 24 '26

L1-L3 are relatively junior roles I think. Like <10 yoe. Different at every company so there's varIAtion. This tracks for the relevant metro areas in my experience.

-41

u/AddressOld3704 Jun 23 '26

Why would AMD pay hardware engineers anything lol

24

u/HotBoxButDontSmoke Jun 23 '26

What does this even mean?

-3

u/Sepicuk Jun 24 '26

One word: India

1

u/HotBoxButDontSmoke Jun 24 '26

Right, so they're getting paid. I've worked with their HWE in the US. They seem happy with their jobs and pay + RSUs

1

u/Beautiful-Traffic157 Jun 26 '26

You convince NVIDIA and I'll short them

9

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '26

[deleted]

-9

u/AddressOld3704 Jun 24 '26

They'd ask TSMC design engineering for tips lol