Check out our 2016 Salary Guide here.
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*For positions with junior, middle and senior level salary ranges, the mid-level range is displayed above
Before we dive into the employee descriptions and salary ranges, here are three tips for negotiating salary from partner and co-founder Matt Massucci of Hirewell, a Chicago-based recruiting firm.
When negotiating salary companies take several factors into consideration:
- current compensation
- your skills and experience
- how your skills and experience line up with the existing team
- how your skills line up with the overall market (other offers you've received)
Honesty
Be honest and open about your salary history from the start. More often than not it comes up through employment verification and other aspects of the interview process. If you’re not being truthful it’s going to harm your chances at getting the job.
Be Realistic
You should be open and realistic. Money is always a factor when making a job change, but if you’re just chasing money than you might end up somewhere that is not a great place to work. That is: a place that has a hard time keeping people due to culture, work-life balance or other factors that may be important to you.
Prove Your Worth
It’s all about leveraging and building a case. If you are striving for a job or compensation that might be a stretch, you need to prove why you’re worth it. Be thoughtful and be able to articulate why you’re worth what you think you are. If it is too much to overcome in the interview, consider asking for a three or six month review to prove yourself.
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Backend Developer
Salary: Junior: $60,000 to $80,000; Middle: $80,000 to $100,000; Senior: $110,000 to $150,000
Backend developers must be able to efficiently design, build and deploy software applications. They work closely with other software developers, QA Engineers, product managers, sales representatives, marketers and executives to fine-tune software features to the needs of customers.
- Build efficient and scalable software
- Identify and address performance issues
- Participate in design and code review sessions
- Identify and prototype best practices for backend engineering
- Skilled at performance debugging and benchmarking
Skills: .NET, Android (Java), C#, DevOps, iOS (Objective-C), Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, quality assurance, Ruby, API best practices
Front End Developer
Salary: Junior: $50,000 to $70,000; Middle: $70,000 to $85,000; Senior: $80,000 to $115,000
Front end development is where software design meets the user. Good front end developers build websites, apps and software programs that not only perform technically well, but are also easy to use. They work closely with the product development team, UX designers, and the engineering team to craft the software closest to the user.
- Implement interactive front end features and graphical designs
- Write clean and high performance code
- Collaborate with the engineering department, and other departments, in an agile software development environment
- Works with designers turning wireframes and mockups into the real thing
- Architect and build scalable, maintainable, testable, and reusable applications
Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, web browsers
Mobile Engineer
Salary: Junior: $60,000 to $70,000; Middle: $75,000 to $100,000; Senior: $110,000 to $180,000
There’s an app for almost everything these days: mobile engineers are the people who build them. Whether on iOS, Android or Windows, mobile engineers are putting the next generation of computing in our pockets. They must be able to work with a diverse set of team members, have a strong understanding of UX, and be up-to-date on the rapidly evolving mobile application space.
- Developing, releasing, and maintaining mobile applications
- Collaborating on software projects with project managers, UX designers, backend developers and QA engineers
- Participate in design and code reviews
- Knowledgeable of agile software development and other methods
- Strong understanding of user experience best practices
Skills: HTML, CSS, Javascript, iOS SDK, Android SDK, Windows SDK, agile software development, APIs, Objective-C
Senior Backend Developer/ Senior Software Engineer
Salary: $80,000 to $125,000
Description: Senior Backend Developers must be able to efficiently design, build and deploy software applications. They work closely with other software developers, QA Engineers, product managers, sales representatives, marketers and executives to fine-tune software features to the needs of customers.
- Build efficient and scalable software
- Identify and address performance issues
- Participate in design and code review sessions
- Identify and prototype best practices for backend engineering
- Skilled at performance debugging and benchmarking
Skills: .NET, Android (Java),C#, DevOps, iOS (Objective-C), Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, quality assurance, Ruby, API best practices
Companies hiring similar positions now
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Inside Sales
Salary: $35,000 to $60,000
Inside sales representatives are the first part of the sales process. Whether it is responding to inbound emails and phone calls or sending outbound emails and phone calls, inside sales representatives must be good at starting a conversation cold and then warming it up to be passed to sales representatives or account managers.
- Following up and qualifying on inbound leads and phone calls
- Reaching out to prospective customers via emails and phone calls
- Handling large scale email campaigns in coordination with the marketing team
- Assist customers in their purchase decisions with product demonstrations, technical sales support, and best practices
- Building the funnel of qualified sales leads for the rest of the sales team
Skills: Phone sales, email sales, understanding of the sales process, email marketing, persistence, strong speaking abilities
Account Manager
Salary: $60,000 to $100,000
Account managers keep customers happy. Happy customers keep buying. Positioned between the product team and sales team, account managers work to improve customer relations by helping them with their existing products and upselling additional helpful products or features.
- Responsible for all customer communications, conflict resolution, and compliance
- Manage contracts and customer billing communications
- Monitor customer activity, analyze performance, and suggest areas of improvement
- Upsell features to customers to increase revenues
- Resolve customer problems with customer support and engineering teams
Skills: Sales, customer support, ability to understand technical subjects
Account Executive/ Sales Representative
Salary: $60,000 to $100,000
In front of every successful company is an army of good sales representatives. In an era of increasingly complex digital services and products, the art of sales has become ever more sophisticated. Modern sales representatives not only have to have the gift of gab, but also an ability to quickly learn new technologies and work with marketing, product and engineering teams. They must be outgoing, but also introspective enough to organize their sales efforts for efficiency.
- Build, grow and manage a pipeline of accounts.
- Create new customers by cultivating new relationships and regularly setting up product demo’s.
- Engage and respond to existing accounts by scheduling check-ins and also customer service inquiries
- Researching trends and best practices, reading business publications, seeking out learning and development opportunities and utilizing internal resources
- Work with engineering and customer service to provide feedback and stay updated on the products latest’s features and benefits
Skills: selling, product demonstration, CRM, marketing, customer service,
Sales Director
Salary: $90,000 to $150,000
As manager of the sales team, sales directors are key to driving higher sales growth. Sales directors set the tone of sales campaigns and keep an eye on company interaction with customers. Behind any successful sales team is a manager supporting and directing.
- Effectively articulate the value proposition to senior-level stakeholders and make internal recommendations to support its evolution
- Cold call, prospect and lead generation activity to develop an ongoing pipeline of opportunities
- Develop sales process and cadence that leads to more efficient company-wide selling over time
- Meet quarterly and annual sales quotas while contributing to the larger business development and marketing efforts of the team
- Help develop sales materials like brochures, case studies, and website copy with the marketing team
Skills: Sales, management, email marketing, sales strategy, lead generation
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Marketing Manager
Salary: $75,000 to $120,000
Marketing managers must be fluent in a whole range of branding and outreach methods, from social media to print advertising. Using a variety of methods marketing managers create a strategy to advertise their company’s brand then execute that plan by managing a team of marketers, advertising partners and PR representatives.
- Create marketing strategy to most effectively sell products & services
- Execute marketing strategy
- Coordinate with marketing, advertising partners, PR represenatives, and sales team
- Market research products and competitors
- Periodically access ROI on marketing efforts
Skills: Marketing research, strategic planning, social media, advertising, messaging, personnel management
Creative Director
Salary: $120,000 to $160,000
Creative directors lead the creation of marketing and sales materials. They are the mastermind behind the artistics aspects of a company’s marketing efforts. Creative directors must be knowledgeable in a variety of fields including UX, copywriting, web development, advertising, and design; and they must bring all those disciplines together into a coherent brand voice.
- Own the voice of a brand through a variety of channels, including print, web and email distribution
- Work closely with sales, marketing, web development teams to produce new materials
- Design and execute a brand strategy
- Write copy for websites, advertisements, and social media
- Keen sense of branding
Skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro, HTML, CSS, copy writing, web development, advertising
Data Scientist
Salary: $75,000 to $125,000
Most companies are swimming in a sea of data. It is the job of data scientist to distill that data into actionable information. Using statistics, analytical software and a savvy understanding of user behavior data scientist find ways for companies to improve their performance.
- Knowledge of statistics, machine learning, and probability models
- Ability to use software to tease out patterns in the data
- Help the company better understand customers by working with backend developers, engineers, system administrators, and marketers
- Ability to visualize and articulate data patterns to colleagues
- Design experiments leading to a better understanding of data and how to improve its predictive ability
Skills: R, Python, Matlab, Tableau, statistics, user behavior, marketing, business best practices
Product Manager
Salary: Junior: $70,000 to $90,000; Middle: $85,000 to $110,000; Senior: $110,000 to $150,000
Product managers drive development of new products for companies. It’s their responsibility to guide the process from prototype to marketable product. They work with engineers, designers, managers, marketers and customer service representatives to make sure all inputs are properly considered and, if needed, added to the product.
- Act as champion for product success, from product requirements specifications through product release
- Define product strategy through collaboration with internal stakeholders, customers and prospects
- Perform technology assessments, competitive assessments, and monitors industry standards and innovations.
- Release roll-out training and education for technical personnel and writes technical white papers, presentations, and product announcement documents
- Effectively coordinate and communicate with other company functions, such as development, sales, professional and technical services to ensure that the product’s success
Skills: Google Analytics, A/B testing, user behavior, business best practices, agile software development, product life cycle, product launching, product positioning
Companies hiring similar positions now
UX Designer
Salary: Junior: $70,000 to $85,000; Middle: $80,000 to $95,000; Senior: $90,000 to $120,000
User experience designers are responsible for improving user engagement with websites, mobile apps and software. They study the behavior of users and then use methods like A/B testing to see how changes in the design influence user behavior.
- Design and prototype aesthetically pleasing interfaces
- Work closely with engineering and product teams to define and develop new features
- Help create a beautiful and modern application that targeted customers enjoy using
- Test new features on users and optimize design around results
Skills: HTML, CSS, Javascript, A/B Testing, design abilities, Adobe Photoshop, Google Analytics
Companies hiring similar positions now
Digital Marketing Associate/ Content Manager
Salary: $50,000 to $70,000
A Digital Marketing Associate knows how to tell a company’s story. This person is part digital marketer, part journalist and part social media guru. Digital marketers must boil down their company’s marketing into marketing copy people will appreciate engaging with.
- Write copy for websites, press releases, blog posts and advertisements
- Engage community through social media content
- Create video and other multi-media content
- Analyze and improve website SEO
- Manage company websites with content management systems like Wordpress
Skills: Wordpress, HTML, CSS, AP Style Guide, knowledge of Google Ad Words, SEO, Adobe Suite
Related: Best Startups to Work for in Chicago
*Note: The above salary ranges represent reference numbers for digital tech companies in the city of Chicago.The information was gathered from Hirewell. Salaries will vary across industries, companies and locations. Salary is also dependent on the negotiating ability of the employers and applicants.
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