How Akamai Pays

Technical ladder — R0 through IC7

Management ladder — M1 through M5

Executive and board — EVP through Board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Akamai job postings and salary datasets expose the Software Engineer 1 through Senior Principal Software Engineer sequence, but no Akamai document maps those titles onto numeric grades.
• The two research bundles disagree on the management ladder itself. One normalizes managers as M1 through M6 ending at the C-suite, the other as M1 through M10 with separate vice president, senior vice president and executive vice president rungs. This report uses the shorter M1 to M5 form plus a filed executive tier.
• Architect, Security Architect and Solutions Architect titles appear across the careers site and the salary datasets, but their placement against the engineering ladder is not publicly disclosed.
• Akamai has absorbed Linode, Noname Security and Fermyon among others. No public filing explains legacy grade conversion, salary protection or equity conversion for those employees.
• The non-employee director row is a governance package, not an employment band, and is excluded from the range chart.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Cambridge

Akamai does not publish city-level headcount. The Form 10-K names Cambridge and Bangalore among its largest properties and one bundle adds Krakow and Tel Aviv as the next largest, but no office in this catalogue is ranked by employee count. The FlexBase model lets more than 95 percent of employees choose home, office or another approved workspace, so an office address is a weaker signal of pay geography here than at most peers.

Cambridge anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Cambridge column is the anchor. Software Engineer 1 through Senior Principal medians come from Levels.fyi United States records cross-checked against Glassdoor and Akamai's own advertised base ranges.
• Six of the sixteen Cambridge rows rest on a direct observation. The graduate, fellow, senior director and vice president rows have no public submission at all and are modeled bridges.
• Bangalore is the second-best evidenced market, with five observed rows. Software Engineer 1 sits at about 1.95 million rupees total and Principal Software Engineer at about 10.32 million rupees.
• India total compensation runs at roughly 15 percent of the Cambridge anchor at the graduate band and rises towards 48 percent at the top of the ladder, because senior Indian packages carry a much larger equity share.
• The executive vice president, chief executive and director rows are proxy disclosures converted for comparison only. They are global values, not a local pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Adding the 8.0 million approved shares to the 9,187,362 available at 12 February 2026 implies about 17.19 million available before subsequent grants. That is a mechanical roll-forward, not a verified current reserve.
• On the pre-amendment snapshot, outstanding awards were about 49.3 percent of outstanding-plus-available plan capacity. After simply adding the new shares the same awards would be about 34.2 percent. Utilisation after the 2026 grant cycle is not publicly disclosed.
• The proxy-disclosed net burn rate was 3.5 percent in 2023, 3.2 percent in 2024 and 4.3 percent in 2025, so dilution pressure rose in the most recent year.
• No stock options were outstanding at 12 February 2026. Every full-value award in the pool is a restricted, performance or deferred stock unit.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Executive time-based restricted stock units vest in three equal annual instalments, and the performance and relative shareholder return units cliff at the end of a three-year period. Employee submissions show both a three-year and an alternative four-year pattern in circulation, so the employee schedule should be read off the individual award agreement rather than assumed. Director deferred stock units vest in full at the first anniversary.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Broad eligibility is a filed fact, not an inference: the Form 10-K says the vast majority of employees hold stock awards and the proxy says new employees are generally eligible for a new-hire award.
• Broad does not mean uniform. Observed annualized stock runs from about $2.9 thousand at Software Engineer 1 to roughly $108.8 thousand at Senior Principal, a factor of nearly forty across the same ladder.
• No standard graduate grant is evidenced anywhere in the three bundles, so the R0 row carries a modeled allowance rather than an observed award.
• The bundles' own annual grant estimates by band run $2 thousand to $8 thousand at Software Engineer 1, $15 thousand to $40 thousand at Senior Software Engineer 1, $80 thousand to $180 thousand at Senior Principal, $100 thousand to $250 thousand at director and $400 thousand to $1.2 million at vice president. The vice-president figure cannot be reconciled with the same bundle's $650 thousand total for that level.
• India observations show the same shape in rupees: about 135 thousand rupees of annualized stock at Software Engineer 1 rising to about 2.6 million rupees at Principal Software Engineer.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Cambridge

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $105.13 reference price at 25 August 2026 reference price and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The two bundles present the same executives differently. One shows the Summary Compensation Table as filed, where the stock column carries both the long-term award and the share-settled annual bonus; the other shows an approved-grant view that separates the annual incentive from the approved stock award value. The totals agree to within rounding, but the stock figures differ because a grant approval value and a Summary Compensation Table accounting value are not the same measurement. This report uses the filed table for the executive rows and the approved values for the grant architecture. Akamai's stock ownership guidelines require roughly six times base salary for the chief executive, three times for other named executives, one times for other participating senior executives and five times the cash retainer for non-employee directors.

Board compensation framework

The director package is heavily weighted to stock at about 79 percent of the standard $350,000, which puts director incentives on the same footing as the executive programme. No stock options are granted to directors.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Equity timing is the most concrete part of the annual cycle. Annual awards to eligible employees are generally made on the first Monday in March, new-hire grants on or about the twelfth of a month, and executive bonus shares after the annual results are certified. Internal mobility is real rather than rhetorical: nearly 16 percent of open positions were filled internally during 2025, supported by Career Hub, mentoring and the L.E.A.D. leadership programme.

Dataset summary

City-level H-1B wage history

All-years aggregates. P25/P75 are rounded reconstruction values marked modeled; medians and record counts are the stronger fields.

Selected title / worksite records

Evidence classification

Explicit “Not publicly disclosed” index

Known gaps and diligence before relying on a cell

1. 1The two bundles normalize the management ladder differently. One uses M1 through M6 ending at the C-suite, the other M1 through M10 with separate vice president, senior vice president and executive vice president rungs. This report uses the shorter form because it is the one with a matching numeric band table.
2. 2The bundles disagree on the Software Engineer 2 anchor, at a $149 thousand median total against a $159.3 thousand representative package, and on the Senior Principal base, at $230 thousand against $245.8 thousand. This report uses the lower figure in both cases because it comes from the bundle that publishes a full low, median and high table.
3. 3The director row is the widest disagreement in the non-executive ladder. One bundle models $380 thousand total and the other observes about $447.5 thousand on the current Levels.fyi director page. The anchor uses $380 thousand for consistency with the rest of that bundle's table.
4. 4The vice-president row does not reconcile inside its own source: the same bundle estimates annual stock of $400 thousand to $1.2 million while giving a $650 thousand total against a $300 thousand base. This report honours the total and treats the equity estimate as unusable.
5. 5Executive figures differ by measurement basis. The approved 2025 stock-award values total $13.770 million for the chief executive while the Summary Compensation Table stock column reads $15,954,171, because a grant approval value and an accounting value are different measurements and the table also carries the share-settled annual bonus.
6. 6The bundles use different currency snapshots, 24 August and 25 August 2026, differing in the third decimal place. This report standardises on the 24 August snapshot, which covers every currency used here including the New Zealand dollar and the dirham.
7. 7The $105.13 reference share price is dated 25 August 2026, yet the insider log shows executed prices of $126.77 on 15 July and $132.46 on 12 June 2026. Both figures are carried as filed rather than reconciled.
8. 8H-1B extracts cannot be merged. MyVisaJobs and SponsorWage cover FY2025 at a $157,006 average and a $153,489 median, while H1BGrader covers FY2026 at a $169,939 median on a different filing set, and the same provider shows a different median on its own summary page.
9. 9Peer chief executive pay differs between bundles for Fastly, at $5.692 million against about $6.80 million, and the two bundles choose different peer sets entirely, one using F5, Cloudflare, Fastly and Palo Alto Networks and the other adding DigitalOcean and Zscaler.
10. 10Akamai discloses segment revenue and an Asia Pacific milestone above $1 billion for 2025 but no full geographic revenue split in any reviewed source, so no regional revenue panel is shown rather than a partial one.
11. 11One bundle documents India benefit details from the country guide while the other records the same items as not publicly disclosed. The guide figures are used here and attributed to the guide.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-24

Single-date conversion layer for comparability; it ignores payroll-date FX, tax, purchasing power, benefits valuation and hedging. Compensation intelligence, not legal, tax, investment, immigration or employment advice.

Source register — 18 sources

Growth has been modest and partly offset by restructuring: Akamai cut headcount in some areas during 2025 while redeploying into security and cloud, at a charge of roughly $55 million. The three figures above come from different source types, a Form 10-K, a prior filing and a website, so the trend is directionally reliable rather than precisely comparable. Akamai publishes no numeric attrition rate and no city-level headcount at all.