How Flexport Pays

Individual contributor ladder — Software Engineer I through Principal

Management ladder — Manager through Director

Executive — Vice President through Executive Vice President

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Flexport uses conventional technology titles rather than numbered grades. The individual contributor names visible in postings and salary records are Software Engineer I and II, Senior, Staff and Senior Staff; the management names are Manager, Senior Manager, Group Manager or Head of, and Director.
• The operations organisation runs a parallel and much larger title family that this ladder does not price: Operations Associate, Global Operations Associate, Customs Brokerage, Account Executive and warehouse roles. Their reported medians sit far below the engineering ladder and, critically, barely move between cities.
• Flexport's public senior engineer sample shows a median tenure of about eight to nine years, which is high for a senior title in the technology market and implies a slower promotion cadence than the four-to-five-year expectation common at large product companies.
• Because Flexport is private, no title carries a filing obligation. There is no Section 16 officer list, so nothing distinguishes a compensation-disclosed officer from an undisclosed one; every officer is undisclosed.
• The 2023 restructuring compressed the leadership layer and moved several senior operators into new titles at once. Titles announced in October 2023 are the most recent published roster located, and Flexport has not published an updated leadership page in the sources reviewed.
• The chief executive row is deliberately absent from the band table. Modelling a founder chief executive's pay from public logistics proxies would import a number that has nothing to do with Flexport.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus San Francisco

Flexport does not publish an office directory with headcount, and the count of offices reported by third-party profiles ranges from about 20 to about 40. The 21 markets here are the 20 the research bundle's evidence map carries with a stated confidence level, plus San Bernardino, which appears as a named worksite on the FY2025 visa filings. Sydney and Mexico City are deliberately not substituted for Melbourne and Guadalajara without current careers evidence.

San Francisco anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The San Francisco Bay Area column is the anchor. Software Engineer I through Staff Engineer come from Levels.fyi Flexport records for that metro: $201,000, $247,000, $335,000 and $398,000 total.
• New York is the only other United States city with a direct Flexport observation. Software Engineer II reads about 5 percent above San Francisco and Senior Software Engineer about 1 percent below, so New York is set at parity on total and marginally below on base.
• Bellevue carries no Flexport salary record but 18 of the 38 FY2025 labour condition applications, more than San Francisco's 11. Its factor is a Washington-versus-Bay-Area market differential, not a Flexport observation.
• Amsterdam is anchored on Netherlands records of €103,000 at Software Engineer I and €133,000 at Senior. Those imply factors of 0.60 and 0.46 against the anchor with no consistent slope between them, so a flat factor is applied and the spread is recorded as a gap.
• Greater Bengaluru is anchored on two levels only, ₹5.23 million at Software Engineer I and ₹6.06 million at Software Engineer II, which imply 0.27 and 0.26 of the anchor. Because the observed ratio is flat across both, no top-of-ladder factor is applied.
• Shenzhen and Shanghai are anchored on the bundle's China technical median of about ¥554,000, roughly 35 percent of the United States median at the report's foreign-exchange snapshot.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

• The option pool size, the annual grant budget, the strike price history and any refresh policy are all undisclosed. Nothing in the public record allows an employee to check what fraction of the company a grant represents.
• Preferred stock and uncapped convertible notes both sit ahead of common. In a sale below the preference stack, common options can be worth nothing even at a headline valuation in the billions.
• A ten-year exercise window solves the timing problem but not the money problem. The employee still owes the strike price and, for incentive stock options, potentially alternative minimum tax on the spread at exercise.
• The absence of a documented company-run tender offer means the practical route to liquidity is a brokered secondary at an indication price, with the company able to block the transfer.

What a Flexport option is worth on paper

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Four years, one-year cliff, quarterly thereafter, consistently across employee reports. What separates Flexport from the market default is what happens after departure: 10 years to exercise rather than 90 days. That converts a forced decision at the worst possible moment into a long-dated call option on the company, and it is the single most valuable structural term in the package.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Options appear in reported packages at every evidenced level from Software Engineer I upward, so equity is not a senior-only instrument at Flexport. What is not evidenced is any minimum eligible role, any grant matrix or any guarantee that a given offer carries a grant.
• The annualised option component runs at roughly 25 percent of the reported package at Software Engineer I, 27 percent at Software Engineer II, 33 percent at Senior and 35 percent at Staff in the San Francisco sample.
• Non-United States packages show a smaller option share. The Netherlands sample carries €23,000 of annualised stock at Software Engineer I against a €73,600 base, about 22 percent of the package.
• Refresh grants, promotion grants and retention grants are not documented in any source. An employee cannot verify from public information whether Flexport refreshes annually, at promotion, or not at all.
• Because the strike price is set at each 409A fair market value, an option granted at the 2022 valuation and one granted at the 2026 mark are different instruments even at the same nominal share count. Employees hired at the peak may hold options struck above the current secondary indication.

Indicative annual grant value by band — San Francisco

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $2.95 reference price at 25 August 2026 Forge Price indication for Flexport common stock and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The October 2023 restructuring named Stuart Leung as Chief Financial Officer, promoted from head of finance after nearly seven years at Flexport and replacing Kenny Wagers, alongside Sanne Manders as President International, Bill Driegert as EVP North America, Nader Kabbani as EVP Customs Trade and Financial Services, Parisa Sadrzadeh as EVP Small and Medium Business and Omnichannel, Neel Jones Shah as Chief Customer Officer for Key Global Accounts, Harish Abbott as Chief Customer Officer for Omnichannel, Ashianna Esmail as Chief Legal Officer, Anders Schulze as SVP Ocean Freight, Akash Chauhan as SVP Fulfillment and Distribution Operations, Charles Chang as VP of Technology, Zeid Houssami as VP of Airfreight, Ted Boeglin as VP of Marketing and Michael Brown as SVP and Head of Restructuring. Flexport has not published an updated leadership roster in any source reviewed for this report, so some of these titles may since have changed without any public record.

Board compensation framework

Everything a reader would normally check in a proxy statement about board pay is absent here by structure rather than by omission. A private company simply has no filing obligation, and Flexport has not chosen to publish voluntarily.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one progression signal in the public record is tenure, not policy. Employee-reported data puts the median Flexport senior software engineer at roughly eight to nine years of experience, several years above the level's usual benchmark at large technology employers. Read alongside two 20 percent workforce reductions in 2023 and a 2 percent reduction in October 2024, that suggests a period in which promotion and backfill both slowed, and it is the most useful thing a candidate can take from the absence of a published framework.

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 research bundle for Flexport contains no structured data file and no completed research report. Its recovered validation log records the report and implementation as missing, so this report is built from the bundle's execution brief, its recovered dashboard carrying the disclosure boundary and the 20-market evidence map, and the public sources that dashboard names.
2. 2The bundle's country medians and the current Levels.fyi pages disagree on India. The bundle records an India technical median of about ₹4.69 million while the live Greater Bengaluru median reads about ₹5.65 million and the India-wide median about ₹5.76 million. This report calibrates Bengaluru on the city-level figure, which is consistent with its anchor-city methodology, and records the bundle's lower figure here.
3. 3The chief executive row is deliberately omitted from the band table. Modelling a founder chief executive's pay would import a number from public logistics proxies that has nothing to do with Flexport, and it would distort every location factor at the top of the ladder. The vice president and executive vice president rows are kept but excluded from the range chart and marked as envelopes.
4. 4Headcount sources conflict. One profile reports about 2,100 employees for 2025 while another reports over 2,800 across 89 countries in the same period, against 2,893 at 30 June 2026. This report uses 2,893 as the current figure and shows the conflict in the headcount trend.
5. 5Valuation marks conflict by design. Nasdaq Private Market estimated $3.74 a share on 11 August 2026, Forge $2.95 and Hiive $3.00 on 25 August 2026, against an $8 billion February 2022 round and a late-2024 third-party estimate near $3.8 billion. All four are shown rather than averaged, and the $2.95 Forge indication is used as the report's nominal share price.
6. 6City factors outside San Francisco, New York, Amsterdam, Shenzhen and Bengaluru carry no Flexport observation at all. They are market differentials applied to the anchor and are a grade less reliable than the observed markets.
7. 7No top-of-ladder factor is applied to any market. In every market with more than one observed level the ratio was flat or moved in an inconsistent direction, so interpolating a compression curve would be inventing a pattern the data does not show.
8. 8No employer benefit load is included in any total. Total compensation is base plus bonus plus annualised option value, so it reconciles to the components and does not mix employer cost into employee pay.
9. 9The frontline freight operations and warehouse population is excluded from the band table and from every location factor, because its reported pay barely moves between San Francisco and Chicago while the professional ladder's does. Its figures are carried in the narrative instead.
10. 10The management rows use three separate small Levels.fyi leadership samples that do not order themselves cleanly by title. This report orders them by observed value and states the title each observation carried, rather than smoothing them into a single invented curve.
11. 11No leadership roster more recent than the October 2023 restructuring was located, so some titles listed may have changed without any public record.
12. 12Flexport publishes no geographic revenue split, so the revenue panel is omitted entirely rather than repurposed.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-25

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 — 15 sources

Flexport has shed roughly a quarter of its people since 2022 and is now growing again from a much smaller base. For anyone reading a Flexport offer, the practical consequence is that internal pay comparisons inside the company are unusually noisy: a long-tenured employee, a 2022 peak-valuation hire and a 2026 joiner sit on different salary vintages and, more importantly, on different option strike prices.