The San Francisco-based career marketplace Hired has recently published its State of Salaries 2018 Report, which demonstrates that the average salary of a blockchain engineer has boomed dramatically over the past year.

Furthermore, a recent CNBC article broke down Hired’s latest numbers on the subject and reported that the average blockchain engineer is now making somewhere between $150,000 and $175,000 annually.

According to Hired’s data, the average software engineer only makes, on average, $135,000 per year. That means that the average blockchain engineer has a paycheck premium of between 11% and 30% compared to other software engineers.

This paycheck premium is symptomatic of the increased demand for blockchain engineers following last year’s surge in the price of Bitcoin.

The CNBC report notes that recognized names such as Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are all posting job listings for blockchain engineers, showcasing the strong market appetite for such software engineers.

”There’s a ton of demand for blockchain,” according to Hired’s CEO Mehul Patel, who expanded on the market appetite for blockchain developers. ”Software engineers are in very short supply, but this is even more acute and that’s why salaries are even higher.”

Moreover, Hired added that it has seen the number of employers listing blockchain as a ”desired skill” among potential employees increase by a whopping 400% only since the end of 2017.

Those looking to reap the rewards of this surge in market demand for blockchain engineers should, however, be aware of the requirements. Blockchain engineers should preferably know everything from database design and networking to cryptography computing skills.

Furthermore, blockchain engineers code in a variety of different programming languages, such as Java, JavaScript, C++, Solidity, Python, and Go.

The CNBC piece also notes how Dustin Welden, who works at the Seattle firm Globys with a blockchain-related accounting services project, has experienced the increased blockchain interest firsthand.

”When my title became ’principal blockchain engineer,’ it became relentless,” Welden stated, adding that he now received interview requests on LinkedIn ”every day”.

Hired’s salary comparison tool also suggested that demand of blockchain engineers is the highest in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is followed by demand in New York and London.

Previously, blockchain-related positions have mostly been ”hidden” behind nondescript job listings such as ”systems engineer”, ”back-end engineer”, or ”solutions architect”. Nevertheless, the recent surge of interest in blockchain could prompt blockchain expertise to be more prominently expressed in job descriptions.

Hired’s CEO Mehul Patel went on to suggest that ”there’s a mindset here of taking a long-term view of planning,” before stating that ”if you’re going to build blockchain technology, you have to get that talent.”

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