Comment by jtakkala

There's definitely top-notch software and security engineers making well north of £150k in the UK. As you go up in levels, it's indeed a small set of people, but FB / Google comp for a top L7 engineer working in the same space as Signal engineers can be $700k+ in the UK. Just have a look at levels.fyi, and you'll see that even finance will pay over $500k in London. Furthermore, given how small the group of people are at the top of these companies, very few will self-report their incomes publicly, which is why you'll rarely hear about the engineers making $1M+ – but those cases do exist.

The people behind Signal pioneered end-to-end encryption, and as is pointed out in the blog post, there's still a lot of novel cryptography development involved in building a privacy-first messenger. You can't do that without top-notch talent.