Our goal is to create an environment where you can do the best work of your career while maintaining a sustainable work-life balance. That requires us to build a hyper-efficient, high-margin company so that each team member has a generous salary. To make the company accounting work, that also means we aim to hire fewer people that are more productive.
Instead of negotiating individual salaries, Chromatic has a transparent and equitable policy for calculating compensation. This document lays out our approach.
Our compensation benchmarks are based on Pave.com (they recently also acquired Option Impact), a tool that evaluates compensation policies from companies across the industry. Pave is considered to have the most accurate data around, but it isn’t always perfect. We also supplement and adjust with market data from other places. We follow the following principles when it comes to determining an offer:
🔹 Location-agnostic
All employees are benchmarked to San Francisco (Tier 1) salaries, no matter where they work. Historically, San Francisco was the locus for our industry’s top talent (with outrageously high cost of living) and thus commands the highest salaries.
For non-US employees, salary will be paid in local currency. During compensation review, salary is adjusted based on the average exchange rate for the previous year and is never adjusted downward.
🔹 75th percentile
We pay 75th percentile salaries (based on companies with a similar valuation).
We’ll align our own roles with the most applicable Pave “job family” and level. In addition, we’ve established a +/- 5% band around the 75th percentile to represent progress as an employee moves across their individual level:
Since we don’t expect anyone to be able to do everything a role requires on Day 1, most roles are designed for an employee to join at the Learning level.
Salary adjustments will be made once a year, aligned with our September review cycle unless folks receive a promotion at a different time. We’ll pull the latest Pave benchmarks (which include inflation). We’ll ensure that no one will get a pay cut even if benchmarks go down.