Brisbane tech salaries for FY27: what our placements say

How's the market? Selective.

That's the theme of FY27. The backlog has cleared, the wait-and-see crowd is hiring again, and what's left are employers who know exactly what they want and will pay for it. For that, and only that.

Straight up on salaries - the core bands barely moved. National wage growth is 3.2 per cent, the average pay rise people actually got this year was about 4 per cent, and the 15 to 20 per cent jumps for a sideways move that everyone got used to in 2022 and 2023 are done.

If a number in here looks wrong for your role, it might be. Flick me an email at jason@blackroc.co and argue it with me.

The AI premium is real, for people who've actually shipped it

Twelve months ago every job spec said AI fluency, and not one hiring manager could tell me what it meant. This year they can. They want engineers who have put LLM features into production, data people who can build the pipelines underneath them, and leaders who know an experiment from a product.

That crew is small in Brisbane, they know it, and they're clearing a 10 to 15 per cent premium over the equivalent general engineering role.

A real example, with the details left out on purpose

We thought hard about sharing the specifics of this one. We're not prepared to share someone's career journey without their consent - and even with it, I wouldn't want to put them through the attention that comes with it. So this is as generic as I can make it. Every number is real.

If you're doing this work and your resume doesn't say so, the market can't pay you for it. Fix the resume first.

The architect-builder

The bigger shift is what senior even means now. The person hiring managers keep describing to me is what we've started calling the architect-builder. They make the architecture call, then build it, ship it and run it themselves. No handoffs, nothing thrown over the fence.

When we asked one Brisbane technology leader what he wanted us to find next, his answer was effectively: find me another one of him, pointing at an engineer already doing exactly that in his team.

That profile sits at the very top of the cloud, data and AI bands above. I've given it two full pages in our FY27 Brisbane Permanent Hiring Report, and I'd read them before the tables.

Think you're underpaid? Read this before you quit

Look at what you're on and compare it with the tables above. They're overwhelmingly accurate for Brisbane.

If the gap is more than $10,000 a year, it's worth doing something about. In this market though, I wouldn't quit because you feel underpaid.

Take this guide to your boss or manager and have the conversation. Plenty of people get it fixed that way. If you want a hand working out how to raise it, email me at jason@blackroc.co.

It's definitely not the market right now to throw the towel in.

If you're 23 and trying to break into tech

Grad and junior bands are flat because teams are automating the exact work those roles used to learn on. I don't think it's permanent, but that's where FY27 sits.

My advice is blunt. Keep your retail job, and keep building your engineering skills on the side as best you can. Offer yourself for free internships with engineering teams. I know - rent's due and time's short. That's what the retail job is for. I worked two or three jobs in my late teens and early twenties, and plenty of people your age are doing the same now.

What sets you apart is your ability to hustle, to present, to connect with people, hold a conversation and ask good questions. Get How to Win Friends and Influence People and read it two or three times. It's as old as the hills, and it still works.

Then go door knocking. Find engineering managers in Brisbane on LinkedIn, track down their email addresses and write to them. Go to events and talk to them in person. It's absolutely key.

Office days: what's really happening

The strongest candidates want two days a week in the office, at most. It goes up if they're senior and building a team, or at the pointy end of an intense project.

Here's the interesting bit. Plenty of companies stipulate three or four days from the get-go. What's actually happening, far more often than not, is people going in barely a day a week. We see it week in, week out.

Worth pondering, whichever side of the desk you're on.

For hiring managers: what's costing you good people

Slow offers. Always the biggest one. In a selective market the good candidates still have options, and the business that moves first usually wins.

Inflexible office days. A lot of the work recruiters get right now is roles that need people in the office far more than they get to work from home. Why? Because those are the genuinely hard roles to fill.

A vague number. Be specific, and don't let the word competitive do the job a real number should.

How we built these numbers

Every range is annual base salary in AUD, excluding super, for permanent roles in Brisbane. They're built from BLACKROC placements, live client briefs and what candidates asked for over the past twelve months. We then cross-checked them against national salary surveys and ABS wage data and adjusted them for FY27 (1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027).

BLACKROC is a deliberately small, senior team. Twelve people, more than a century of recruitment experience between us, all of it in this market, and 610+ five-star Google reviews from clients and candidates.

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