If you know you're not going to pay SF (or even US) sized salaries, why waste everybody's time with multiple interviews then? State up front "We're only willing to pay $80k, even if you've got the history (previous salary, measured prior project impact, demonstrated skill in the areas we need, etc) to justify 2x or 3x that". You won't be able to pick your interviewees brains on possible solutions, but you also won't be wasting their (and your) time.
We don't want to waste anybody's time, actually efficiency is one of our values https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/#values. We do pay SF and US salaries (see https://about.gitlab.com/team/ for an idea where our team is). But as said the higher the salary the higher the bar. We think there are exceptional people in the SF Bay area and we would like them to work for us.
I tried to figure out a salary range for positions to prevent wasting everybody's time. But we still very frequently go higher or lower than I guessed based on the person's ability and their location (and cost of living).
I would like to prevent disappointing people like bitshepherd and I'm open to suggestions.
My suggestion would be to be completely up front in what you're willing to pay, even going so far as to add it to the job description. If that means you have salary 'bands' dependent on what region of the US an applicant is from, put 'em up.
Ninja-edit: also, if the money just isn't there, consider taking on someone on a part-time basis. $80k/yr is terrible FT wages for the senior-level folks you're looking for, but if you say "We'll pay you $80k, and you just clock in M-W 9-5 (or M-F 9-1, however the math makes sense for you to divvy up a 20-hour week)" I think you'll see an uptick in interested, qualified applicants. Yes, it's a compromise (just like asking a senior-level anything to show up for $80k) but at least you'll get the senior-level brainpower on the team and still be within your budget.
Ninja-edit x2: Looking at the 'Team' page, I'm not getting a good sense of where your devops/engineering talent hails from. The folks who appear the most USian are the guy who lives 'on a farm', another who 'attends SFO Giants games', a third who 'enjoys the slopes in the Sierra Nevadas', etc. Everyone else's location is either unmentioned, or they seem to hail from Brazil, the UK, Greece, etc. The interactive map at the top seems to be mapping the accounts of suits and c-levels, but very few devops/engineers.
Thanks for looking into this and your suggestions.
I think the salary bands per region is an interesting idea. If we would have these today we would put them up.
In some functions (for example finance) we have part-time team members. But in a fast growing startup it makes sense to have many full-time people to reduce (communication) overhead. We are prepared to pay up where that is needed. We do allow flexible workdays for everyone. And based on ability and responsibility we also consider 4 day workweeks.
The map at the top is something we invite all our team members to join. Currently we don't have any engineers living in SF/NYC. We do have other team members in sales, finance and marketing living in SF and NYC. I do expect us to higher one or two engineers in SF in the coming months.
Consider setting up an office in Bangalore, you can find great developers here and considering the cost of living differences you won't have to pay a lot.
If you know you're not going to pay SF (or even US) sized salaries, why waste everybody's time with multiple interviews then? State up front "We're only willing to pay $80k, even if you've got the history (previous salary, measured prior project impact, demonstrated skill in the areas we need, etc) to justify 2x or 3x that". You won't be able to pick your interviewees brains on possible solutions, but you also won't be wasting their (and your) time.