There is one Twitter employee whose disproportionate paycheque is no doubt the talk of the water cooler, after revelations an engineer is paid $10 million a year for his skills.

Christopher Fry is Twitter's senior vice president of engineering; top dog in an exploding industry. His whopping salary was made public in documents recently tabled ahead of Twitter's introduction to the stock market.

The engineer built a bank of $US10.3 million last year, just a small way behind the chief executive Dick Costolo's $US11.5 million haul. Mr Fry is paid more than several of the company's higher-ups, outstripping the chief technology officer, chief financial officer and chief operating officer.

Mr Fry's paycheque is seen as a reflection of the state of play in Silicon Valley; where businesses are exploding and desperately crying out for top-level engineers to introduce the big innovation that will bag billions.

Most of Fry’s money has been offered in the form of stock awards, setting him up for some real financial buoyancy when the company is floated later this year.

It is unclear what length Twitter went to in order to sign the top-gun programmer, but there are reports of other companies going to extremes to lock in the talent they seek. One company offered its new hire a year's lease on an electric car - worth about $1000 a month, another firm says it would strategically place existing staff near the in-office ping pong tables or bar as a way to secure prospective recruits.

Accommodation-search service ApartmentList rents a drum studio to help retain a key engineer, and Google famously allows engineers to devote 20 per cent of their time on personal projects.

The bar has been raised on the skills of engineers though, with many companies reporting they are on the hunt for a '10x engineer'; new industry slang for one person who can do the work of ten – a clearly worthwhile investment if one can be found and hired.

Mr Fry may just be the perfect hire for Twitter, with its friendly blue bird logo. Fry has completed a post-doctoral fellowship on the auditory cortex of zebra finches.