Counted November 8, 2026 · from employers’ own postings
Applied Ai Engineer: $205K median posted pay.
From 49 salary bands employers posted on 74 open applied 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 | 10 | — (6 of 8 bands) | — |
| Staff | 8 | — (3 of 8 bands) | — |
| Principal | 4 | — (3 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Appian Corporation | 4 | — |
| Thread AI | 2 | — |
| Ramp | 2 | — |
| Luminai | 2 | — |
| Booz Allen Hamilton | 2 | — |
| Outsmart | 2 | — |
| NewsBreak | 2 | — |
| Level | 2 | — |
| Databricks | 2 | — |
| Bolt.new | 2 | — |
Counted from employers’ own job boards. The ten with the most open applied ai engineer roles right now.
The skills, as the postings name them
What these postings ask for.
| Skill | Postings | At entry |
|---|---|---|
| Machine Learning | 46 | — |
| Python | 45 | — |
| Software Engineering | 40 | — |
| Agent Design | 36 | — |
| Observability | 35 | — |
| Retrieval-Augmented Generation | 30 | — |
| TypeScript | 28 | — |
| Cloud Infrastructure | 22 | — |
| Prompt Engineering | 19 | — |
| LLM Evaluation | 18 | — |
Where the work is
15% of these roles are remote.
- Remote15%11 roles
- Hybrid11%8 roles
- On site65%48 roles
- Not stated9%7 roles
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How this was counted
Every figure is counted from 74 open postings read from employers’ own job boards on November 8, 2026, and recounted every night. Pay is the band the employer posted — never an estimate, never a model — and 49 of these postings carried one. Titles are grouped by the words the postings use, with levels, shifts and schedules removed, so “Senior Applied Ai Engineer (Nights)” counts here too. 100% 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.