Hardware Engineer Posted Median Falls to $135,750 — On Just 6 Listings | Career App Daily
The posted median for Hardware Engineer roles across the boards we track fell from $222,000 in the 30 days before last to $135,750 in the last 30 days. That is a drop of $86,250, or 38.8%.
Before anyone reads that as a pay cut: the recent figure rests on 6 listings. The earlier one rested on 29. Both numbers are employer-posted salary ranges, annualized to USD (hourly rates at 2,080 hours), taken from the job ads themselves — not from what anyone reports earning. At six listings, one large-cap semiconductor posting or one entry-level board-bring-up role moves the median by tens of thousands of dollars.
The pool shrank faster than the median
The more informative number here is the listing count, not the dollar figure. Hardware Engineer postings with a disclosed salary range went from 29 to 6 — a 79% decline in the sample — during a stretch when total new postings across the boards we track went the other way hard: 44,145 new listings in the last 30 days against 12,788 in the prior 30.
So the pool of hardware roles that publish pay got thinner while overall volume more than tripled. Whatever is driving the median down, it is a change in which hardware jobs are being posted with numbers attached, not evidence that the same employers repriced the same jobs.
Every occupation with a tracked salary move went down
Hardware Engineer is not an outlier. All eight occupations with enough posted-pay history to compute a 30-day move fell, and most of them fell hard.
- Account Executive: $225,000 to $130,000, on 155 listings then 11 now
- Hardware Engineer: $222,000 to $135,750, on 29 then 6
- Human Resources Business Partner: $185,000 to $110,000, on 11 then 5
- Financial Manager: $236,500 to $153,500, on 9 then 8
- Mechanical Engineer: $200,000 to $138,750, on 83 then 13
- Accounting Manager: $200,000 to $144,500, on 18 then 8
- Engineering Manager: $285,400 to $208,510, on 190 then 12
- Compliance Officer: $277,625 to $277,625 — correction: $277,625 to $212,000, on 8 then 7
When eight of eight move in the same direction and seven of eight see their disclosed-pay pool shrink, the honest read is a mix shift in what is getting posted with a range on it, not a synchronized wage reset across sales, finance, HR, and engineering at once.
Where the standing levels sit
Hardware Engineer does not appear in the current top-ten occupations by number of listings with posted pay, so there is no large stable pool to anchor against. The nearest engineering comparisons that do have volume: Mechanical Engineer at a $193,500 median across 96 listings, Software Engineer at $240,000 across 1,123 listings, and Machine Learning Engineer at $281,750 across 98. Engineering Manager sits at $280,000 across 202 listings.
Against those, the $135,750 recent hardware median reads low even for engineering work — which is another reason to treat it as a six-listing sample rather than a level.
What to do with this
If you are negotiating a hardware role right now, the prior-30 figure of $222,000 across 29 listings is the sturdier of the two data points, and the mechanical and software medians above are worth having in the room. Watch the count as much as the dollars: when the Hardware Engineer disclosed-pay pool climbs back toward 25 or 30 listings, the median it produces will actually mean something.
Among employers posting this week, NVIDIA added 221 new listings against 817 open, and Jabil added 234 against 734 — the two largest hardware-adjacent boards in this week's top ten. You can filter both on Job search.