Amid ongoing layoffs and hiring freezes, the tech industry continues to face uncertainty—and Singapore hasn’t been spared.
Salaries have taken a hit across the board, with almost 50% of tech roles (7 out of 16) across the city-state seeing a decline in 2024, according to Nodeflair’s annual tech salary report.
This includes AI-related positions, which, despite increased investment in the industry, have also seen salary cuts.
Here’s a breakdown of the report and the overall compensation changes for tech roles in Singapore:
Disclaimer: Salary data are derived from Nodeflair’s proprietary data base of over 130,000 data points, including user submissions that are verified by documents (payslips and offer letter) as well as job advertisements from various job portals for the year 2024. While a majority of the entries are backed by a sizeable amount of data, Nodeflair has flagged out entries with less than 200 data points as potentially lacking accuracy.
Roles with overall salary decreases
Based on the report, the role that has seen the highest pay cut is cybersecurity engineers, with their pay dipping by 4.6% in 2024.
This is followed by systems analysts, quality assurance, data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and mobile engineers.
Interestingly, despite the surge in AI’s popularity in 2024, salaries for AI-related roles in Singapore (particularly data-focused positions) dipped by 1.2% to 2.4%, marking a sharp contrast to the 11.3% year-on-year growth seen in 2023.
Roles with overall salary increases
But it’s not all doom and gloom for the tech industry—some roles still saw salary growth, with game engineers leading the pack with a 28% year-on-year increase.
Other tech roles that have seen an uptick in salaries besides game engineers include solutions engineers, SysOps, systems engineers, blockchain engineers, product managers, software engineers, site reliability engineers and DevOps.
Software engineers—who make up the largest share of tech professionals in Singapore—saw their salaries rebound with a 3.3% year-on-year increase, reversing the 1.0% dip from last year.
This growth may be linked to rising demand for the role. While AI investments have surged, many projects now rely on OpenAI’s ready-made tools, reducing the need for data specialists to build models from scratch.
As a result, there’s greater demand for traditional software engineers to develop and integrate these tools—which could also explain the dip in salaries for specialised data roles.
Companies that pay more than the median
Based on the report, it seems like the glamour of the tech industry is starting to fade.
However, if you’re still keen on a tech career, here are some of the most popular companies in Singapore (based on search data) and their salary offerings—most of which are higher than the median pay.
These companies could be worth considering if you’re looking for roles that offer competitive salaries and potential for growth.
- You can access Nodeflair’s full report here.
- Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s job trends here.
Featured Image Credit: Shadow of light / Shutterstock.jpg
