How we pay people

Pay is where a company's values get tested, because it's where the incentives are. Anyone can claim to be fair when nobody's watching the numbers, so we wrote ours down. Here is the whole philosophy and the actual formula behind it, every input visible and none of it going to change.

Fair, transparent, and the same for everyone

We pay people fairly for the work, and we run the exact same framework for everyone. Your pay is a function of your level and the role, computed the same way it's computed for the person next to you. It is not a function of how hard you pushed in the offer call, whether you happened to hold a competing offer that week, or how comfortable you are talking about money.

Transparency is how we keep ourselves honest. Inside the company, anyone can understand how pay works and roughly where they sit. Secret pay is how quiet unfairness survives: it's a lot harder to underpay someone systematically when the framework is sitting on the table for everyone to check.

Why we don't negotiate

We make our best offer and we explain how we got there. We don't sandbag the first number so we have room to "come up," and there's no reward for brinkmanship. If you think we've misjudged your level or missed something real about your experience, tell us and we'll fix it. That's a correction, not a negotiation.

This isn't just tidiness. Negotiation looks neutral and isn't. The research is consistent: women and people from underrepresented groups are, on average, less likely to push hard on salary, and more likely to be penalized socially when they do. So a company that pays according to who negotiates hardest is quietly building unfairness straight into its payroll and calling it merit. We'd rather just get the number right the first time, for everyone, than reward the people who happen to be loudest about their own worth.

It cuts both ways. You don't have to be a shark to get paid fairly here, and "another company offered me more" isn't a lever, because we're not pricing against panic. We're pricing against what the role is worth.

The formula

Every base salary at Flagon comes from the same four ingredients, multiplied together:

base salary = benchmark x level x step x location factor

That's it. No secret adjustments, no discretionary fudge factor for people who ask nicely. The benchmark is the market anchor for a role. The level and step place you within that role by scope and by depth. The location factor adjusts for the market you work in. Change one input and you can see exactly what changes in the output, which is the point.

Levels: scope, not status

There are five levels. They describe the scope and impact of the work you're trusted to own, not your title, your tenure, or how senior you sound in a meeting. You level up by doing bigger work, not by waiting your turn.

• Junior. You're building your craft. You own well-defined pieces of work and grow fast with support around you.
• Intermediate. You own features end to end and need little scaffolding to get from problem to shipped.
• Senior. You own ambiguous, important problems and make the people around you better. Senior is the anchor of the whole system, the 1.0 that every other level is expressed relative to.
• Staff. Your impact spans beyond your own work: you shape how whole areas get built and set the technical direction others follow.
• Director. You own outcomes at the scale of the organization, holding responsibility for how large swaths of Flagon operate and succeed.

Notice these are described by what you're trusted to own, not by status. A Senior who deepens their craft is worth more than a Staff who coasts, and the framework should reflect that. That's what steps are for.

Steps: depth within a level

Within a level, four steps capture how established you are at that scope. Each step is a band rather than a single point, so your pay lands in a range and can grow without you changing levels at all.

• Learning. You're new to this level and still growing into its full scope.
• Established. You're solidly operating at this level. This is where you land when you join, by default.
• Thriving. You're consistently exceeding what the level asks for.
• Expert. You're one of the people others look to at this level, setting the bar for it.

Location: market, not cost of living

We're remote-first, and pay does vary by where you are, but not the way most companies do it. We don't dock your pay because your rent is cheap. We follow the local market rate for the work, the way GitLab does it: the location factor reflects what your skills command in your market, not what it costs you to live there.

There's a floor built in, so nobody ends up underpaid for living somewhere the market undervalues. And because it's a published rule applied identically to everyone, it's not a private discount we negotiate person by person, and it's not something anyone can game.

Try it

Put the four inputs together and you can see a real range. Here's the calculator we use, so you can price out any combination yourself instead of taking our word for it.

Equity, reviews, and what comes next

Equity for everyone. Everyone building Flagon gets options on a standard vesting schedule, because the people who make it work should own a piece of what they built. That's part of playing the long game together. The full terms are in share options, alongside the rest of the package in benefits.

Reviews you don't have to ask for. We revisit pay proactively, a few times a year, so keeping your salary right is our job, not a thing you have to work up the nerve to raise. If the benchmark moves or you've grown into a new level or step, we catch it and adjust. You should never have to schedule an awkward meeting to be paid what the framework already says you're owed.

Real bands, published. We hold pay to the same standard as the rest of this handbook: a pay decision that can't survive being written down where the people it affects can read it is probably the wrong decision. That's why the framework is public, and Flagon's own bands land here as we set them. See how this handbook works.

The direction is fixed and public: fair, legible, and the same for everyone. If you want to argue with the framework, the Discord is open, or email hey@flagon.io.