How much does an AI Engineer make?

The median AI Engineer salary is $156,000 per year, from 248 job postings that disclosed pay across 37 companies in October 2026. Most fall between $97,620 and $220,500.

Which companies pay AI Engineers the most?

Of employers with at least three open AI Engineer postings, Apple posted the highest median range at $241,750.

Do remote AI Engineer jobs pay less?

In this sample remote-eligible postings had a median of $180,500 against $198,025 for onsite — 8.8% less.

What skills do AI Engineer jobs require?

Across 300 AI Engineer posting descriptions read in October 2026, the most frequently required were: Python, AWS, Java, Azure, Kubernetes. The top one appears in 40% of postings.

AI Engineer Skills and Job Description (October 2026)

Name: AI Engineer salary data, October 2026
Creator: FitToHire

Python is asked for by 40% of AI Engineer employers, the most common requirement across 300 live postings read in October 2026. Then AWS, Java, Azure.

Median posted pay is $156,000, most postings between $97,620 and $220,500 — from 248 postings that disclosed it, across 37 companies.

Posted pay is down 3.1% since 2026-09-27 ($160,960 → $156,000).

Check your résumé against these →

These are ranges employers published in their own job postings — not salaries people typed into a form years ago.

What AI Engineer postings actually ask for

Ranked by how many of the 300 posting descriptions mention them.

Python 40%

AWS 25%

Java 19%

Azure 19%

Kubernetes 19%

Distributed Systems 19%

Go 17%

SQL 17%

Terraform 17%

CI/CD 17%

LLM 17%

Electrical Engineering 15%

Kafka 15%

GCP 15%

Data Engineering 15%

Machine Learning 15%

Software Engineering 15%

TensorFlow 12%

PyTorch 12%

Data Science 12%

AI Tools 12%

Security Clearance 10%

Agile 10%

U.S. Citizenship 10%

Would your background clear the bar?

These are the requirements AI Engineer postings list. Paste one of those postings and your résumé — FitToHire checks you against every requirement and shows the evidence behind each verdict.

15 companies in this sample have AI Engineer postings open right now.

Check your fit →

What AI Engineers earn

10th $68K 25th $98K median $156K 75th $220K 90th $275K

$60K $303K

Each bar is a pay band. Height is how many of the 37 employers who published a salary fall in it, counted once each.

Pay bands in numbers

Employer median pay by band
Pay band	Employers
$59,500–$83,850	9
$83,850–$108,200	1
$108,200–$132,550	1
$132,550–$156,900	8
$156,900–$181,250	4
$181,250–$205,600	4
$205,600–$229,950	3
$229,950–$254,300	3
$254,300–$278,650	2
$278,650–$303,000	2
Total	37

AI Engineer vs adjacent roles

Roles people compare this one against, taken from what they search.

software engineer
ai developer
ml engineer
data scientist
data engineer
forward deployed engineer

Who is hiring AI Engineers

15 companies with open postings in this sample.

Apple

$241,750 11

Deloitte

$239,500 158

NVIDIA

$237,500 12

Remote vs onsite pay

Median of remote-eligible postings against the rest.

Remote-eligible

$180,500

Onsite

$198,025

27 remote-eligible postings against 222 onsite. Onsite pays 8.8% more in this sample.

Pay by experience level

Level is taken from the posting title, so only postings that state one are counted.

Mid

$135,300 43

Senior

$184,125 106

Lead / Manager

$199,300 13

Principal / Staff

$190,000 10

Pay by location

Metros with at least three salaried postings.

Santa Clara, CA

$235,750 15

San Francisco, CA

$203,000 10

McLean, VA

$155,175 10

New York, NY

$220,500 9

Seattle, WA

$180,500 9

Cupertino, CA

$234,375 8

Dallas, TX

$145,950 6

Austin, TX

$219,875 6

San Jose, CA

$239,500 5

San Diego, CA

$161,600 5

Pittsburgh, PA

$198,050 4

Nashville, TN

$198,050 4

Where this data comes from

300 live postings analysed
248 (83%) published a salary range
32 (11%) were remote-eligible
48 distinct employers
Requirements read from 300 full posting descriptions
Each employer gets one vote in the median, so a company running a large hiring campaign cannot move it
Ranges are converted to annual figures; hourly and contract postings are normalised before comparison

How the requirements were read

Requirements are not keyword counts. Each posting is read by our extraction engine, which works out what the employer is actually asking for and separates a requirement from a section heading or a line of boilerplate. Two postings asking for the same thing in different words are counted once, because our skills graph knows which phrasings mean the same thing and which imply others.

The share beside each requirement is the percentage of distinct EMPLOYERS in that sample who asked for it, counted one vote per company so a firm posting the same role many times cannot inflate its own requirements. Measured, not estimated, and read from the posting text rather than counted as keywords.

Because every reading is dated, the movement figures above are real month-over-month change. Sites built on self-reported salaries cannot produce that number: their data has no posting date.