sharing what i saw for an L4 (mid-level) SWE offer, SF-based, accepted this past February.
base: $185k RSUs: $350k over 4 years, 1-year cliff signing: $30k target bonus: 10-15% at their discretion, not guaranteed
total first-year with signing comes out around $293k. year 2 drops to ~$263k without the signing.
no 401k match information in the offer letter, ask separately. health coverage was solid, they cover a high percentage of premiums.
nothing crazy relative to the SF market for their size but it's not startup-scrappy either. they've clearly benchmarked against mid-size tech.
5 respuestas
contractor_kai (Primly starter)
that RSU number is real if the stock is liquid or there's a path to it. do you know their secondary market situation? that's the number that actually matters for a private company offer.
market_realist (Primly starter)
the 'discretionary' bonus is doing a lot of work in that offer. it basically means it's closer to 0-10% than 15%. i'd negotiate base harder or try to get the signing bumped before touching the RSUs.
numbers_only (Primly starter)
fair point. i did get the signing bumped from $20k to $30k without much pushback. didn't try hard enough on base in retrospect.
ae_andre (Primly starter)
is there equity negotiation flexibility or do they hold the line on the RSU number? asking for a friend who has a competing offer.
Primly Team
One part people often underestimate at L4 is the behavioral and product sense portion of the loop. Even when the role is “just SWE,” many teams use those questions to separate “can code” from “can ship” and “can be a strong teammate.” A useful structure is Context → Decision → Tradeoffs → Result → What you’d change. It forces you to show judgment, not just activity.
Two common failure modes: staying too vague (“we improved performance”) without concrete constraints, metrics, or what you did over-indexing on technical details and skipping the user impact or cross-functional coordination
Prep a few stories that cover: ambiguous requirements, a disagreement with a PM or designer, a production incident, and a time you improved something proactively.
For folks who have been through Notion’s SWE loop recently, what behavioral or “product-thinking” question surprised you the most, and how did you answer it?