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Twitter’s highest-paid starting salaries

By
JP Mangalindan
JP Mangalindan
By
JP Mangalindan
JP Mangalindan
November 8, 2013, 5:55 PM ET
In all, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo made almost $11.5 million last year.

FORTUNE — Twitter’s (TWTR) IPO may have been low-key, but some of its 2,300 employees have little reason to complain otherwise.

That’s because Twitter salaries likely leave few wanting, according to the company’s recently-filed S-1 document, anonymous voluntary employee disclosures to the jobs site Glassdoor.com, and insight from someone with intimate familiarity with the company’s salaries. Indeed, while CEO Dick Costolo’s annual salary for 2012 was $200,000, he actually made $11.5 million for the year factoring in stock and option awards. And more “rank and file” employees aren’t too far behind, at least where base salaries are concerned. (To wit, staff engineers can reportedly command somewhere between $174,000 and $186,000 a year.) Hardly shabby for a company that, just seven years ago, remained a figment of its co-founders’ wildly intrepid imaginations.

Here’s a look at some of the top-paid Twitter job positions in descending order. Stock and option awards are the value they would have been at the time of hire, though obviously, the engineer hired in 2007 with a $32,000 award is now sitting on millions of dollars more than their 2013 counterpart.

1.) Chief Executive Officer (Dick Costolo)*
Annual base salary: $200,000
Additional stock and option awards: $11.3 million

2.) Senior Vice President of Engineering (Christopher Fry)*
Annual base salary: $145,313
Additional stock and option awards: $10.1 million

3.) President of Global Revenue (Adam Bain)*
Annual base salary: $200,000
Additional stock and option awards:: $6.5 million

4.) Director Sales Operations**
Annual salary: $192,000 – $209,000
Additional awards: $192,000 – $209,000 worth of stock and options at a strike price determined at time of hire

5.) Staff Engineer **
Annual salary: $174,000 – $186,000
Additional awards:: $52,200 – $93,000 worth of stock and options at a strike price determined at time of hire

6.) Senior Managing Site Reliability Engineering **
Annual salary: $168,000 – $182,000
Additional awards:: $168,000 – $182,000 worth of stock and options at a strike price determined at time of hire

7.) Business Development **
Annual salary: $158,000 – $170,000
Additional awards:: $47,400 – $85,000 worth of stock and options at a strike price determined at time of hire

8.) Software Engineer Manager **
Annual salary: $159,000 – $172,000
Additional awards:: $47,700 – $86,000 worth of stock and options at a strike price determined at time of hire

9.) Product Marketing Manager **
Annual salary: $155,000 – $168,000
Additional awards:: $46,500 – $84,000 worth of stock and options at a strike price determined at time of hire

10.) Staff Software Engineer**
Annual salary: $120,000 – $150,000
Additional awards:: $36,000 – $75,000 worth of stock and options at a strike price determined at time of hire

*Information disclosed in Twitter’s S-1 filing. 

**Annual base salaries via Glassdoor.com, except Staff Software Engineer. Additional stock and option awards calculation based on an equation provided from someone with intimate familiarity with the company’s salaries. That same source also provided salary information on Staff Software Engineer salary range. Calculations apply to previous Twitter hires.

About the Author
By JP Mangalindan
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