Counted October 17, 2026 · from employers’ own postings
Research Scientist: $199K median posted pay.
From 134 salary bands employers posted on 221 open research scientist roles in data & science. Never an estimate.
The ladder, by level
What each rung pays.
| Level | Open roles | Median posted band | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior | 40 | $189K | — |
| Staff | 15 | $261K | — |
| Principal | 13 | — (6 of 8 bands) | — |
| Mid | 5 | — (2 of 8 bands) | — |
| Intern | 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 |
|---|---|---|
| BuiltIn Integration Sandbox | 10 | — |
| Bosch Group | 10 | — |
| Astera Institute | 9 | — |
| NVIDIA | 8 | — |
| Anduril Industries | 8 | — |
| waymo | 7 | — |
| ServiceNow | 6 | — |
| Tamus (System Wide External) | 5 | — |
| Applied Intuition | 5 | — |
| Anthropic | 5 | — |
Counted from employers’ own job boards. The ten with the most open research scientist roles tonight.
The skills, as the postings name them
What these postings ask for.
| Skill | Postings | At entry |
|---|---|---|
| Machine Learning | 122 | — |
| Deep Learning | 69 | — |
| Python | 68 | — |
| Physics | 55 | — |
| Statistics | 41 | — |
| Investigation | 38 | — |
| Electrical Engineering | 35 | — |
| Computer Vision | 29 | — |
| Data Analysis | 25 | — |
| C | 23 | — |
Where the work is
2% of these roles are remote.
- Remote2%5 roles
- Hybrid10%21 roles
- On site78%172 roles
- Not stated10%23 roles
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How this was counted
Every figure is counted from 221 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 134 of these postings carried one. Titles are grouped by the words the postings use, with levels, shifts and schedules removed, so “Senior Research Scientist (Nights)” counts here too. 100% of roles with this title sit in data & science, 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.