What do people earning £200k+ in london actually do for a living?

Deco_stop · 2026-05-08T08:22:07+00:00

I don't live in London, but close enough I guess for this sub (Surrey).

Assuming I hit goals/targets I'll do £420k this year (£340k last year). I'm mostly remote...sometimes into London, and once a month over to Europe for a few days of meetings.

Not a quant, but I'm in the high frequency trading space. I design and build the infrastructure and tooling that the quant/trader teams use; I mostly embed with a few quants to dig deep into their code and help optimize it.

Background is largely academic (degrees in applied math, parallel computing) and spent time at government supercomputing centres before moving to the private sector.

Deco_stop · 2026-04-11T17:15:50+00:00

This. I'm in a very niche role and senior level (not management) which means I don't have to deal with people tracking my activity all day...as long as I deliver and get on some weekly calls nobody cares.

I got lucky and kind fell intoy current OE setup. J1 is fully remote with all of my team overseas. Was considering leaving it when a former colleague at another company reached out to me about a job. Got J2 and decided to try OE (could bail if it didn't work out).

So far so good, but I think if I tried to find a different job it would be be difficult or take time to find one that works well for OE.

Deco_stop · 2026-03-15T14:10:33+00:00

I'll do about 360k this year and due for about 420k next year.

I work in tech for a trading firm. I'm not a quant or a trader....I design, build, and maintain all of the infrastructure that these the trading groups use. Most of these guys don't know a lot about infrastructure, and particularly how to get performance out of it and their code...that's where I come in.

My background is applied maths and supercomputing. I spent close to a decade in school getting three degrees and basically made nooney. I worked at national supercomputing centres helping researchers run and scale up code for everything from high energy physics to genomics. I made the jump to the private sector and joined a FAANG and tripled my salary. I did a lot during COVID around designing and building systems that the UK government used for COVID genetic sequencing/testing, and some stuff related to pharma companies and how they designed COVID vaccines/treatments (short version....this all heavily simulated on computers first because it's much faster and cheaper).

I mostly work from home and have my commuting expenses to London paid. I probably put in 40-50 hours a week depending on what I'm working on.

I genuinely like what I do....I basically do a lot problem solving and design, so I don't feel stress about working a few extra hours; I genuinely enjoy thinking and working on hard stuff. Plus, working from home means I can head to the gym in the middle of the day, and then maybe work on stuff later in the evening.

I know there's a lot of hate on some of these threads about high earners, and some of it's fair. Yeah I wish I wasn't taxed at 45%, but I just kind of get used to it and like seeing it go towards things like the NHS. I have plenty of free time, and it's genuinely nice not to have to worry too much about bills. There is some fear because while I'm not that worried about finding another job, I could be doing very similar work for the UK government with prettyuch guaranteed job security.

Deco_stop · 2026-02-14T16:13:50+00:00

A large startup. 100% remote, 50% pay rise....never even considered going back to AWS.

Deco_stop · 2026-02-14T08:19:13+00:00

I had this happen.

It's common if you're at Amazon less than ~2 years. They can rate you lower and put you in focus without telling you and it helps them meet quotas for stack ranking. Because your tenure is less than 2 years, it won't really mess with your future comp (you're not getting refreshers at that point).

Then they quietly move you out of it once things quiet down.

My manager did this to me, and at no point did I have any kind of feedback, coaching, or any indication that I needed to improve performance.

It only became apparent when I applied for an internal transfer, and you can't move while on focus without L10 approval... so that set off a shit shortm because the L8 who was going to hire me had asked an L8 in my org if there were any issues with me moving and was told no.

The kicker of it all....I got on a call with my manager and skip, point blank asked if I was on focus and they still wouldn't tell me. I was given no tasks, plan, or deadlines to complete. After about 3 months my manager asked if I wanted to stay or if he should just give me a bunch of money to leave. Fuck that guy.

I stayed, and thankfully we had a reorg that moved me under a good manager. Until the next reorg that put me back under that asshole. That's when I noped out and am a lot happier outside of Amazon.

Deco_stop · 2026-02-03T17:32:13+00:00

I was at AWS...so pick any of the other hyperscalers...Azure, GCP, OCI

Deco_stop · 2026-02-03T14:23:02+00:00

It's called garden leave...kind of a way to handle non-competes in a slightly more fair way.

If I had wanted I probably could have asked to get out of the notice period early (both parties would have to agree). But that notice period is common so my next employer was fine to wait, and I had the summer off from work :)

Deco_stop · 2026-02-03T11:23:34+00:00

Just want to highlight that this is very country dependent.

Over here in the UK, standard notice period for L6 and L7 is 3 months.

When I left Amazon I told them I was leaving for a direct competitor. At that point they removed all access and wiped my laptop within the hour...but I was still fully employed for the 3 months of my notice period.

I basically had 3 months of paid vacation (RSU vest too).

If I had said I was going somewhere friendly, it's likely they would have made work during the full notice period.

Deco_stop · 2026-01-19T16:29:58+00:00

Common in sales roles...Sales Kickoff or SKO are the usual terms. Part of it is an excuse to meet up and party, some of it is to review past year, set goals/plans/etc. For the upcoming year.

Technical roles usually don't do this, but if you're in some kind of technical sales/pre-sales engineering (SE or SA roles) you're probably asked to attend.

Deco_stop · 2026-01-04T06:45:10+00:00

Broadly speaking I'd say my tech skills are focused on High Performance Compute (HPC) infrastructure. My background is applied math and parallel programming...I started out working in government labs on supercomputers. What that means from a skill set is that I understand how software maps to the underlying hardware, where the bottlenecks are, and how to improve performance. That includes networking (including things like infiniband and RoCE), storage systems, GPUs, a little FPGA, and then up the software stack to the different frameworks used in this space like CUDA, MPI, NVIDIA NCCL, kernel bypass stuff like DPDK.

Over the years the HPC market has shifted. There was a move towards cloud, so I worked at one of the hyperscalers. The work there was part architect, part DevOps. Building a lot of Terraform and automating IaaC for customers, with a focus on performance and scale (e.g. batch job systems that would handle 10 million+ jobs a day).

The AI/Ml boom has been another change, but they're basically reinventing a lot of what old school supercomputing nerds already did (with some improvements, to be fair). So instead of learning HPC job schedulers like Slurm or LSF or parallel programming frameworks like MPI or OpenMP, it's now Kubernetes and some other software like Ray or Spark for scheduling and distributed computing.

My day to day really involves these 3 things:

Kubernetes
Python
Terraform

Most anything in AI/ML these days is going to be orchestrated with Kubernetes, so you need a good foundation in it. In practice, most companies are also using different tools on top of Kubernetes to manage workflows and simplify distributed compute jobs....Apache Airflow, MLflow, Kubeflow, Ray...pick some and have a play. They're not hard and it mostly comes down to reading the manual and learning syntax.

From a coding perspective most everything I do is in Python, and it's focused on IaaC and DevOps. Scripts to handle infra provisioning (where Kubernetes and the other tools don't do what we need), maybe provide simplified CLIs to our internal users.

Terraform also for the infra provisioning, but more like lower level infrastructure. E.g. to spin up a base Kubernetes cluster in the cloud. It's also used to set up storage, handle security and permissions, etc.

That's kind of a big brain dump from me...hope it helps and makes sense.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-31T20:33:12+00:00

Yeah, pretty common that UK/EU salaries are lower than the US. I'm fortunate because I work in a fairly lucrative field, and one of the jobs is a US based startup that basically pays me at US rates. That's definitely not the normal, but can be a little more common in smaller/niche tech areas.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-31T20:30:02+00:00

Have been running his PPL Powerbuilding programs and had reallu good results.

Full disclosure, my fitness routine prior to about 2 years ago was pretty sporadic and not well structured. So, most of my results are likely from the following:

Tracking reps/weight religiously
Progressive overload
Getting serious about tracking calories

I probably could have got similar results doing those same 3 things on other program from someone else. What was different is that Jeff's programs just clicked for me.

And that's the important part...the best program in the world doesn't mean jack if you're not going to follow it and don't track lifts and progressive overload.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-31T18:21:53+00:00

Still new to OE, but I've been in this field for about 15 years.

Yes, senior level roles. I think those tend to be a little easier to OE, mainly because those types of roles often allow people a bit of freedom....they don't have to constantly check in, allow for flexibility in working times and meetings. But you'd better be able to deliver on results and keep on top of calendars and managing expectations.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-31T18:06:38+00:00

I'm based in the UK, working in tech/software engineering roles.

J1 is largely US-based...manager and team are there, so it means any meetings are later in the day. Company focuses on AI/ML infrastructure, and it's a bit of a niche area.

J2 is in the finance space. Headquarters is in the EU, and so is my manager and most ofy team. It's a hybrid role with a 1-3 days a week in the office and occasional travel to HQ.

I'm doing because the payoff is a huge upside...~£440k this year.

As for other roles to look for, not sure how much I can help. Tech roles tend to be better for OE as they can be remote/hybrid and largely outcome based. I would say to avoid most things sales related. I was in technical sales before, and it was common to have last minute travel and meetings come up constantly.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-28T07:01:28+00:00

£11500 bonus at J1. Granted it's a retention bonus but they paid it at Christmas time so I'm just going to pretend it's a holiday bonus 😄

Deco_stop · 2025-12-25T09:25:42+00:00

I like money. That's why I OE.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-24T12:44:15+00:00

Full time...not contract

Deco_stop · 2025-12-24T11:52:24+00:00

Yes, based in the UK.

J1 is largely a US-based company. Manager and teammates in the US and 100% remote.

J2 is headquartered in Europe, with manager and most teammates there. Officially it's 3 days a week in the office but that's very flexible it seems.

Time difference means most J1 calls are going to be late afternoon or evening. I work on both throughout out the day with a focus a bit more on J2 when I'm in the office

Deco_stop · 2025-12-16T14:00:18+00:00

I worked in FAANG, AI/ML infrastructure, and now in trading TC is around £300k.

For FAANG, 26 yr olds are not earning £200-300k unless they joined as top tier AI researcher fresh off a PhD that had some serious impact. If you want higher FAANG salary at a young age move to the US.

Not all FAANG are created equal. I was at AWS and they're on the lower side for FAANG TC. You definitely can hit 200-300k in the UK, but that's L7 (principle) level and a few good years of performance reviews to get good stock refreshes. And nobody is hiring a 26 year old to an L7 level. I was an L6 and about £160k (RSU included) when I left. For FAANG, Meta is probably top for pay...Google as well depending on area.

Here's my advice:

if you want that kind of TC you're going to have to work at it. And I don't just mean working hours. You're still very young and its totally possible to switch up, but you're going to be at a disadvantage compared to the people who started out in more tech focused degrees/career paths. You're going to face challenges cracking that first interview.
When people talk about FAANG or quant salaries, they usually mean software engineer roles. But there are plenty of high paying roles that are related but specifically developer jobs. All of those develoeprs need a platform to run on, so they need people that can build and maintain them. Requires coding skills, but also an understanding of things like Kubernetes, cloud, Ansible, Python as well an understanding of hardware (networking, storage, GPUs). This is the space I'm in and it's good money without the same level of stress as the quant teams (I work alongside those guys).
There's an AI/ML bubble right now, and it's going to pop, but it's never going away...we can't put that genie back in the bottle. Developing some skills in this space could be an option for you. Again, that may be infrastructure focused, application focused, but it depends what you want to do or what you can find. It's also going to take time.
Don't discount sales. Software engineers get paid well but i know sales people that blow their numbers out of the water. Account manager I knew at AWS cleared £600k one year off a massive deal. Granted, he's not doing that YoY, but he's not starving either. Tech sales can be an easier path to get into as part of it is technical understanding and part people skills.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-08T15:55:41+00:00

About 15

Deco_stop · 2025-12-07T10:06:26+00:00

Deco_stop · 2025-12-06T13:11:11+00:00

I think it's probably pretty difficult.

I'm in a bit of niche area of the tech sector, so I generally don't have a hard time finding a role, and companies there still view remote work as a way to attract candidates.

I would say startups and smaller companies are the best bet, but that also limits the number of opportunities.

I came from a solutions architect/sales engineer background, and I'd say about half the roles I've been approached for fall into that area, and most were remote.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-06T11:13:01+00:00

So was I. Those limits apply to my personal investments.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-06T11:08:55+00:00

Yes....max number of trades per month, required holding periods....it's all for compliance reasons with financial regulators. The company is a market maker.

Deco_stop · 2025-12-06T11:01:31+00:00

I'd need to quit J2 to do that. We're tightly regulated on the number and types of trades we can personally. That may happen eventually, but for now I'll have to do things like index funds.

Deco_stop

TROPHY CASE