Top 10 highest-paying remote tech jobs (May 2026)
The "you can't make real money working remote" line still gets repeated like it's 2019.
Here are ten remote tech roles live in May 2026 paying $280K to over $500K. All real listings on Remoet. Sorted by upper salary band. Notes on each one underneath.
The list
1. Crossover. SVP of Technical Product Management.
$400K+
Crossover is a remote-only operating company that buys and runs B2B software businesses. SVP-level role, technical-product slant. The "+" on the salary means uncapped, and Crossover is known for actually paying the high numbers it advertises (they hire globally and benchmark to top US comp). Not an engineering role, but a senior product leader who can read system architecture.
2. OpenAI. Principal Software Engineer.
$385K - $490K
The cash range is wider than most because OpenAI's leveling is opaque. What's notable is that this is a remote listing from a company that until recently was very SF-anchored. If you're top-decile and have shipped at scale, this is the band you want.
3. Confluent. Director, Engineering.
$323K - $387K
Director-level engineering management at the Kafka company. Distributed systems and streaming data. Confluent's technical bar is high, and director roles there usually carry seven to fifteen reports plus on-call rotation. This is leadership comp, not IC.
4. Anthropic. Cluster Deployment Engineer.
$320K - $405K
This one's the interesting one. Cluster Deployment is the team that actually stands up the GPU clusters Anthropic trains on. Half DevOps, half hardware-aware infrastructure engineering. The skill set is rare and very recently in demand, which is why the floor is north of $300K. If you've operated multi-thousand-node training clusters, this is your ticket.
5. HubSpot. Principal Software Engineer.
$314K - $502K
The widest band on the list. HubSpot's Principal SE track covers multiple sub-levels, which is why the spread is nearly $200K. The high end is reserved for Principal II / staff-equivalent profiles. They have several openings live right now in this exact band, all remote-friendly across the US.
6. Coursera. VP, Corporate Development.
$300K - $350K
Corporate development at Coursera, meaning M&A, partnerships, and strategic capital. Not technical, but I'm including it because it's remote and the comp is in the same band as senior IC engineering roles. Useful data point: VP-of-something-not-engineering can match Principal SE pay if the company values it.
7. Reddit. Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer.
$293K - $410K
Senior Staff ML at Reddit means you're working on ranking, recommendation, or moderation models that touch billions of impressions a day. Reddit is public and pays in stock as well as cash, so the listed band is the cash component. Total comp is materially higher.
8. Airbnb. Principal Software Engineer, Performance.
$292K - $365K
Performance-specialty Principal SE. Airbnb's web app has been a long-running performance grind given the booking funnel and the volume of geo-specific content. If you've built browser-perf telemetry and shipped Core Web Vitals work at scale, this is the team.
9. 1Password. Principal Developer, AI & Developer Team.
$291K - $437K
1Password is building developer-facing AI features (CLI integrations, secrets management for agents). Principal-level role on a small team with high autonomy. Canadian company, hires across US and Canada remotely. The wide band reflects geo-adjusted comp.
10. Databricks. Principal Engineer.
$280K - $385K
Generic Principal Engineer listing, which is a tell. Databricks has multiple Principal openings across the lakehouse stack. The band is steady, not flashy, which matches their general posture: pay competitively, expect senior engineers to ship, no theatrics.
What the list tells you
A few patterns worth naming.
Most top-paying remote jobs are Principal or Staff IC. Five of ten on this list. The Principal Engineer band has settled into roughly $280K to $500K across the industry, with the spread depending on location, equity, and how the specific company levels.
AI infrastructure is its own pay band. Anthropic's cluster deployment role pays cluster-deployment money because almost no one on the planet has the operational experience. Same logic shows up at OpenAI, Reddit's ML team, and 1Password's AI work. If you've been running GPUs in anger, your comp ceiling is climbing.
Director and VP non-engineering roles match Principal IC pay. Coursera's Corp Dev VP, Confluent's Eng Director, and Crossover's SVP all sit in the same band as the IC engineers. The "IC track is dead" complaint is wrong. The IC track is fine. The thing that's getting harder is the middle: senior engineers who don't specialize and don't manage.
Wide salary bands are the new normal. HubSpot's $314K to $502K. 1Password's $291K to $437K. Companies publish level-spanning bands so they don't have to repost every level separately. Mostly a transparency win for candidates because it tells you the highest realistic offer if you nail the interview at the top of your level.
How to actually catch these jobs
These ten roles are live on Remoet as of May 2026. Most won't be live by July. The pattern of who's hiring at $300K+ shifts month to month, and the only useful response is to track the companies you'd want to work for, not the individual jobs.
The way I'd approach this list:
Decide which two or three of these companies match your stack and career stage.
Sign in to Remoet and star them. (Star one company and the daily tracking already works.)
Connect your AI agent and let it pull new jobs from those companies as they post.
You read the ones that match. You apply to the ones that fit.
That's the whole loop. This list is one snapshot. The platform is built to give you a snapshot every day, scoped to companies you've already decided are worth your time.
The honest version
A few things I want to flag because they get glossed in salary roundups.
Published bands are not what gets paid. They're the range. Most offers land in the middle of the band. Top-of-band offers usually require either competing offers, deep specialization, or a pre-existing relationship with the hiring manager.
Stock is real but volatile. Reddit, Airbnb, Confluent, Databricks, HubSpot, 1Password are all public or pre-IPO. The advertised cash band is usually stable. Equity grants on top can double total comp at the high end, but they're tied to share-price movement you don't control.
Remote-friendly is not the same as remote-anywhere. Most of these have geo restrictions. US-only, US+Canada, sometimes specific states. Read the fine print before you spend an hour on the application.
This is a snapshot. The list will look different next month. That's the point of tracking the platform instead of bookmarking the jobs.
Happy hunting.
