In the past few years I’ve discussed salaries with dozens of companies as a staff level IC. C++ companies pay significantly less even if the work is far more specialized and challenging. The real money is in “Cloud + python/golang”.
Dozens of highly profitable public tech companies?
There's really on APPL, GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, FB.
Pinterest, AirBNB, Adobe, Intuit, Snap, Roblox, etc are usually a pretty big drop in pay - but usually above all but the highest of high paying startups.
The vast majority of actual cloud jobs - building cloud infrastructure - are low-level - not Python.
Are you talking about startups using AWS? I'm not sure that's a "cloud" job.
In the extremely underpaid start-up world?
C, Java, C++, Kotlin, Swift, etc - IIUC pay MUCH better and are more in demand at companies where you really make good money as an engineer.