This is not the situation for any startups who have already secured funding with a decent runway for expansion. As a software engineer, you're living in a golden age for your profession. Most tech companies are offering significantly higher salaries and bonuses now than pre-pandemic. There are not nearly enough engineers to fulfill the needs of all the successful tech companies. Best advice I can give you is to make sure your coding skills are up to snuff. Use sites like leetcode or a book like cracking the coding interview to make sure your technical interview skills are top tier and you can get hired by any major tech company with a 120k-300k salary to start depending on the company and your skills. As far as roles, data and machine learning engineers are seeing the biggest jump in salaries upwards of $25k bump in last year or two. Good luck!