Software Engineer Product / Infrastructure differences at Meta

I believe at Meta, the pay bands for product/infra are still the same. At some companies (e.g. LinkedIn), engineers in the infra org get paid ~10% higher. The reason for this is the adage of "smart server, dumb client": the more sophisticated business logic + complexity is handled on the backend, so therefore there's an assumption that engineers on the backend/infra are solving harder problems.

In terms of where to indicate your preference, choose the one where you'll be a stronger fit. Prefer the team/org that is most obvious based on your past experience.

ps. sorry for the late reply! I didn't see your question until now because we had a bug that hid certain questions from employee accounts :/