Strategy: Politely deflect past salary disclosures by refocusing the conversation onto market value, the responsibilities of the new role, and your target compensation range.
Script: 'My previous company considers individual compensation details confidential, so I am not at liberty to disclose my exact historical salary. More importantly, because this role involves a significantly broader scope of distributed architecture, technical ownership, and team scale than my past role, I don't believe my historical pay is the best benchmark. Based on current industry compensation benchmarks for this role and the value I will deliver to your engineering team, I am targeting a total package between $160,000 and $180,000. I would love to hear what range is budgeted for this level.'