Strategy: Express genuine excitement and appreciation for the offer first, anchor your counter on market compensation data and your specific technical impact, and propose a specific, reasonable target.
Script: 'Thank you so much for the offer! I am genuinely excited about the opportunity to join the team and contribute to your distributed platform architecture. I reviewed the details of the offer carefully. Based on my five years of experience optimizing high-throughput payment pipelines and current market compensation benchmarks for Senior Software Engineers in our tier, I was targeting a base salary closer to $165,000. If we can adjust the base to $165,000, I would be thrilled to sign immediately and decline my other active interview loops. Is there flexibility in the base salary band to bridge this gap?'