The New Grad List
Live indexThe best new grad software engineer programs, ranked.
New grad hiring runs on a calendar: most 2027 reqs open between August and October and fill on a rolling basis. This is the living index of the programs worth your application — posted starting pay and when each window opens and closes, re-verified as the cycle moves. Every number traces to a posted range, a live careers page, or levels.fyi.
Sources: posted salary ranges, levels.fyi, and company careers pages. Last verified October 10, 2026. How we rank →
New-grad engineers design and build the systems and tools that run the firm, from trading desks to accounting to foundational infrastructure such as network monitoring and risk models. OCaml is the primary language, with Python increasingly used. Jane Street says it teaches what hires need to know and cares more about how you think and learn than prior knowledge.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full Jane Street New Grad page →Jane Street interview guide →
New grads join as L1 engineers on product and infrastructure teams working mostly in Java, Ruby, JavaScript, Scala and Go, and the 2027 req explicitly expects you to use AI tools while validating their output. Every new hire gets a manager accountable for their development, a mentor, and an annual education stipend.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full Stripe New Grad page →Stripe interview guide →
Dev-track new grads (‘one capability, many customers’, versus Forward Deployed’s ‘one customer, many capabilities’) contribute directly to Gotham, Foundry or Apollo on small Product Development teams, involved from prototype through shipping, paired with a mentor. Team placement matches interview strengths to current business needs; there is no traditional career ladder.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full Palantir New Grad page →
New grads join a hub office (SF, Mountain View or Bellevue) at L3 with a manager, a dedicated mentor and an onboarding buddy for the first six months, hired across backend, full stack and infrastructure teams. Applicants pick a single location.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full Databricks New Grad page →
New grads join as SDE I, owning the full lifecycle of their code from design through deployment and on-call, with GenAI dev tools part of the stated job. Placement depends on the req: team-specific reqs (Annapurna compilers and runtimes, Robotics, ADC, Leo) fix the org up front, while the flagship req lets you flag skill areas such as ML, distributed systems and databases and places you by business need.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full Amazon New Grad page →Amazon interview guide →
New grads join as L3 software engineers on a specific project, with opportunities to switch teams and projects as the business evolves. The PhD 2027-start reqs are pooled across AI and Infrastructure, Cloud, YouTube, Search and Ads rather than tied to one team, and candidates report team and location alignment late in the process. The 2026 BS/MS req added ‘experience using AI productivity tools’ to its minimum qualifications.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full Google New Grad page →Google interview guide →
New grads on the Applied Engineering team own customer-facing ChatGPT and OpenAI API features end to end: they talk to users, design solutions, and work with researchers, PMs and designers on speed and scale. The req names a defined stack (JavaScript/React, Python backend, Postgres); team matching happens after the offer. No formal training curriculum is described.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full OpenAI New Grad page →OpenAI interview guide →
Software new grads join a specific team — for example the chip-design infrastructure team building CI/CD, build, regression and release tooling for NVIDIA’s chip designers, or AI and cloud systems software. The one structured program found is the Applied Systems Engineering Rotation: four 3-month rotations (architecture, bring-up, production) over 12 months. Most NCG reqs are hardware, so software seats are scarce and windows are short.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full NVIDIA New Grad page →NVIDIA interview guide →
New grads are hired as Software Engineer IC2 (levels 59–60) into a specific team; the October 2026 reqs include Engineering Thrive Insights (developer-productivity data and AI tooling) and Azure Specialized, and expect engineers to use AI coding assistants daily. After the hire they are auto-enrolled in Aspire for mentoring, events and learning in the first year-plus.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full Microsoft New Grad page →Microsoft interview guide →
The University Grad track hires people finishing a bachelor’s degree into engineering roles. The one live US req, Network Production Engineer, builds experience across Backbone, Data Center and Network Infrastructure teams through first-year rotations. Interviews now put an AI assistant inside CoderPad, so candidates are judged on reading, debugging and building on code with AI help.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full Meta New Grad page →Meta interview guide →
New grads land on one specific team as ICT2 engineers — for example IS&T AI/data-platform reliability, enterprise frontend, or wireless telephony software — with the team set during that team’s own loop rather than via a rotation. IS&T Early Career hires get an Early Career community with educational and social events, per the req text.
Salary band, hiring status & score breakdown — see the full Apple New Grad page →Apple interview guide →
The comp landscape
Posted base-salary bands for each program’s new grad software engineer req, US market — equity, sign-on, and bonus come on top, and at the top programs they add $50k or more in year one. Bands are entry-level; competing offers land near the top. Full breakdown in the New Grad salary guide.
Databricks, Meta don’t post salary ranges and are omitted here.
What is a new grad software engineer program?
A new grad program is a company’s dedicated hiring track for engineers finishing a bachelor’s or master’s degree — usually a single req titled “Software Engineer, New Grad” or “Early Career,” with its own recruiters, a fixed eligibility window (graduation within roughly a year of the start date), and an interview loop tuned for candidates without full-time experience. Most open between August and October for starts the following summer, and the best ones fill on a rolling basis long before any posted deadline.
The programs differ more than the titles suggest. Some run structured cohorts with mentors, onboarding buddies, and team matching after you join; others are evergreen reqs that hire whenever a strong candidate shows up. Starting pay diverges too: posted base bands cluster between $120k and $175k, but equity and sign-on bonuses push total compensation at the top programs well past $200k.
Preparing for the loop? Start with our guides: the Google new grad interview guide and the OpenAI new grad interview guide.
How we rank
Every program gets an Index score out of 100, built from four weighted dimensions. Scores are editorial judgments grounded in the data below — not paid placements.
Posted new-grad base bands, levels.fyi entry-level data, and verified offer reports — total comp where equity data exists, base bands otherwise.
How real the new-grad program is: a dedicated req versus a generic junior opening, cohort structure, mentorship and onboarding, and how team matching works.
What the first job does for the rest of your career — brand strength, alumni outcomes, and the caliber of problems new grads actually get to own.
Req counts, how early and how widely the 2027 window opened, and whether the program is growing, shrinking, or late relative to its own history.
We also track Anthropic, Netflix, Citadel, Ramp, and Cursor, currently outside the ranking. Anthropic has no new grad software engineer req or program — its careers FAQ says it doesn’t offer internships, and early-career hiring runs through the Fellows research program and Claude Corps; the other four are queued for the next data pass. Meta stays ranked despite having no live Software Engineer (University Grad) req because the track has run every prior cycle; Databricks likewise, with its 2027 req expected but not yet posted.
Compensation data comes from posted salary ranges (required in several US states), levels.fyi, and public offer reports; figures are US-market and vary by level and location. Hiring status reflects each company’s careers page as of October 10, 2026. Spotted something outdated? Email [email protected].
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