Who Is Hiring AI Research Engineers — And What They Pay

AI Research Engineers earn a median of $171,700 per year, with most postings between $117,838 and $213,000. From 250 job postings that disclosed pay, across 88 companies, August 2026.

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

Who is hiring AI Research Engineers

15 companies with open postings in this sample.

Anthropic
$277,500 16
Meta
$273,000 4
turing
$260,000 4
Apple
$243,600 11
Information Technology Senior Management Forum
$225,300 3
TikTok
$222,400 3
Google
$213,000 42
Anduril
$207,500 8
Quantum Sky
$195,000 3
Accenture
$190,600 5

Also hiring: AMD, Google, Anthropic, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton, Amazon Web Services, Anduril, Amazon.com, Siemens, Accenture, MaxInsights, turing.

Which of these would you get past?

Paste a AI Research Engineer posting from any of these companies with your résumé. FitToHire scores you requirement by requirement and shows what is missing.

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

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What AI Research Engineers earn

10th $90K 25th $118K median $172K 75th $213K 90th $267K
$80K $288K

Each bar is a pay band; height is how many employers post in it.

What AI Research Engineer postings actually ask for

Ranked by how many of the 400 posting descriptions mention them.

Machine Learning 28%
Electrical Engineering 22%
Research Design 18%
Artificial Intelligence 18%
Design Development 18%
Data Science 12%
Architecture Design 11%
Design Verification 10%
Product Development 10%
Operating Systems 8%
Data Engineering 8%
Data Structures 8%
Generative AI 8%
Visa Sponsorship 7%
Edge AI 7%
Data Pipelines 6%
Global Networking 6%
Vertex AI 6%

AI Research Engineer vs adjacent roles

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

  • ai engineer
  • ai research scientist
  • ml engineer
  • ai developer
  • data engineer

Remote vs onsite pay

Median of remote-eligible postings against the rest.

Remote-eligible
$162,000
Onsite
$194,500

55 remote-eligible postings against 199 onsite. Onsite pays 16.7% more in this sample.

Pay by experience level

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

Mid
$101,000 8
Senior
$190,600 59
Lead / Manager
$214,318 68
Principal / Staff
$225,000 20

Pay by location

Metros with at least three salaried postings.

San Francisco, CA
$235,000 29
New York, NY
$215,050 25
Remote, US
$191,000 10
Seattle, WA
$182,400 9
Aurora, CO
$144,400 8
Mountain View, CA
$199,500 8
Sunnyvale, CA
$233,000 8
Washington, DC
$213,550 7
Austin, TX
$168,000 7
Cupertino, CA
$254,750 7
Santa Clara, CA
$196,575 6
US
$175,000 5

Where this data comes from

  • 400 live postings analysed
  • 250 (62%) published a salary range
  • 80 (20%) were remote-eligible
  • 130 distinct employers
  • Requirements read from 400 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