SG salary report 2024: Tech’s largest pay growth seen for data scientists

SINGAPORE: In Singapore news, NodeFlair, a Tech Career SuperApp, published its Asia Tech Salary Report 2024 on Monday (April 8). The report shows a significant change in salary trends, largely influenced by industry challenges, including hiring freezes and layoffs.

However, the news is not all grim, especially for data science roles in Singapore, where salaries for data science roles are bucking the trend and are getting higher.

Bigger pay drops have been more widely seen in countries concentrating on startups and big tech, showing that salaries are sensitive to the overall economic and business climate.

“Despite the overarching salary reductions, the tech industry remains dynamic. An intriguing trend is the resilience and growth in AI-related roles.

Data science roles, in particular, have seen a significant upswing in Singapore, with a noteworthy increase of over 10 per cent in average salaries. This signals a growing interest and investment in AI technologies,” the report says.

While the salaries for software engineers went up by 7.61 per cent in 2022, they went down by an average of 0.99 per cent last year.

Nevertheless, software engineers see a significant salary difference between the 10th and 90th percentile. Those in junior positions may earn $5,000, while those in managerial positions may earn around to $13,500.

“There is a significant range in salaries at each experience level, especially at higher percentiles.

This indicates that factors such as individual performance, specialized skills, and negotiation ability play a crucial role in determining salaries,” the report notes.

In Singapore, here is the increase or decrease in salaries from 2022 to 2023.

• Mobile Engineer +2.23 per cent year-on-year
• Blockchain Engineer -5.41 per cent year-on-year
• Data Engineer -1.19 per cent year-on-year
• Data Analyst -1.09 per cent year-on-year
• Data Scientist +11.30 per cent year-on-year
• Quality Assurance (QA) +8.01 per cent year-on-year
• DevOps -1.95 per cent year-on-year
• Site Reliability Engineer +0.52 per cent year-on-year
• Cybersecurity Engineer +8.24 per cent year-on-year
• Solutions Engineer -5.69 per cent year-on-year
• Systems Engineer +1.87 per cent year-on-year
• Systems Analyst +8.27 per cent year-on-year
• Game Engineer -6.66 per cent year-on-year
• Product Manager +0.20 per cent year-on-year

The report, which can be found here, also listed the top 15 searched companies in Singapore, in order: GovTech, TikTok, Shopee, Grab, Google, DBS, HoYoverse, JP Morgan Chase & Co., GIC, OCBC, Goldman Sachs, Apple, VISA, Meta and Temus. /TISG

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