My estimated takehome is somewhere in the vicinity of ~$320K. This is comprised of my base salary, yearly bonuses, and yearly stock/equity grants (which I have to hold on to for a year before liquidating (though I tend to let them sit/grow)). Total takehome varies slightly due to minor yearly bonus variances. This figure does not include my employers cost for my healthcare plan, or my employers retirement match contributions (a calculation I have to perform separately because IRS).

I work for one of the better known tech companies in the world. Specifically, I'm a systems software engineer. This means I spend my day designing/writing/maintaining core infrastructure systems. Examples of core services you're probably familiar with might include named, dhcpd, haproxy, slapd, puppetd, etc... While I don't spend my time sitting around hacking on isc-dhcpd, there are a large number of internal base infrastructure services that we do maintain (unfortunately I cannot go into it more, though I wish I could..).

I'm about a decade into my career. I spent a number of years working as a rote linux systems administrator. From there, I got into systems-operations (commonly called ops, sysops, or the unfortunate term of "devops"), and eventually found myself contributing to, then writing low level infrastructure services. I found I enjoyed writing servers more than providing operational support, so I just kept at it.

What I don't spend my time working on are user-facing web applications. My company has a suite of web applications, most of which run on top of the services people like myself design and build.

I would say the type of work I perform is very difficult, and there are very very few people qualified to take up chair. Not only is a solid theoretical background necessary, it is also (almost?) required that you have worked as a proper unix sysadmin. In my observation, very few people command an expertise of both the software-engineering and systems-operations skillset. Those that do are highly sought after, paid very well, and aggressively retained.

So... all that stuff you learned in your operating systems course or unix programming course which you thought you'd never have to worry about again just became a lot more relevant ;P.

Let me know if you have any more questions about working as a systems software engineer.

(note, I'm using a throwaway since I'm an active reddit user and I don't want to disclose my companies salary details)