Counted October 17, 2026 · from employers’ own postings
Ai Engineer: $211K median posted pay.
From 202 salary bands employers posted on 483 open ai engineer roles in software engineering. Never an estimate.
The ladder, by level
What each rung pays.
| Level | Open roles | Median posted band | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior | 149 | $190K | — |
| Principal | 50 | $235K | — |
| Staff | 45 | $262K | — |
| Intern | 5 | — (1 of 8 bands) | — |
| Junior | 2 | — (0 of 8 bands) | — |
| Mid | 2 | — (2 of 8 bands) | — |
Levels as the postings name them. A rung shows a median only where eight or more postings at that level carried a band.
Who is hiring
The employers with the most open.
| Employer | Open roles | Entry level |
|---|---|---|
| Capital One | 61 | — |
| Micron | 22 | — |
| Citi | 9 | — |
| Workday | 9 | — |
| Jci | 9 | — |
| Capco | 8 | — |
| GE Vernova | 8 | — |
| Unison Group | 7 | — |
| ClickUp | 7 | — |
| Salesforce | 6 | — |
Counted from employers’ own job boards. The ten with the most open ai engineer roles tonight.
The skills, as the postings name them
What these postings ask for.
| Skill | Postings | At entry |
|---|---|---|
| Python | 367 | — |
| Machine Learning | 353 | — |
| Cloud Infrastructure | 272 | — |
| Agent Design | 252 | — |
| Software Engineering | 224 | — |
| Observability | 222 | — |
| Retrieval-Augmented Generation | 215 | — |
| Data Science | 194 | — |
| Deep Learning | 165 | — |
| CI/CD | 156 | — |
Where the work is
9% of these roles are remote.
- Remote9%44 roles
- Hybrid10%48 roles
- On site53%256 roles
- Not stated28%135 roles
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How this was counted
Every figure is counted from 483 open postings read from employers’ own job boards on October 17, 2026, and recounted every night. Pay is the band the employer posted — never an estimate, never a model — and 202 of these postings carried one. Titles are grouped by the words the postings use, with levels, shifts and schedules removed, so “Senior Ai Engineer (Nights)” counts here too. 90% of roles with this title sit in software engineering, which is why this page belongs to that career. A title gets a page only where twenty-five or more roles are open, eight or more of them posted a band, three or more employers are hiring for it and four in five of its postings sit in one career, so no page here is a guess.