Pay cut for more interesting work?
I’m currently at a large-ish (public) tech company as a platform engineer with 5+ YOE on roughly £120k base + £15k bonus + ~£55k/year in RSUs. I have a decent team, friends at work, and a comfortable hybrid setup.
The work itself is fine, nothing super shiny or exciting, but I’m not exactly bored. There’s a fair amount of tech debt and things that I don’t enjoy, but there’s still some learning/growth.
I’m currently considering an offer from a US-based startup that’s in the infrastructure-as-a-service space. They are offering me £145k base + £10k sign-on bonus (after some negotiation), on top of stock options. The work is much closer to what I’m genuinely excited about - distributed systems, databases, Kubernetes operators, etc. Basically the deep kind of engineering challenges that’s a platform engineer’s wet dreams. It could also open up a bunch of doors in the future.
The downside is that I’d be giving up a significant amount of liquid RSUs for stock option uncertainty, going fully remote, and having less of a community at work.
I’m considering negotiating higher but I’m not sure I’ll get anything more.
Any advice on whether I should consider this move, or stay where I am and wait for better opportunities?
Keen to hear from people who’ve made similar decisions.