Where do these salaries come from?

Two public sources only. Pay ranges that employers publish in their own job postings, which pay-transparency laws in California, New York, Washington, Colorado and other states require, read from each company's public Greenhouse, Ashby or Lever job board. And the wages employers state in certified H-1B Labor Condition Applications, published by the US Department of Labor every quarter. Every posted range links to its posting.

What does the median mean here?

For posted ranges, each posting counts once at the midpoint of its range, and the median is the middle of those midpoints; the page also shows the medians of the posted minimums and maximums. For H-1B, it is the median offered annual wage over the last four fiscal quarters on file. A median is shown only when at least 3 postings or filings back it.

Is this total compensation?

No. Posted ranges and LCA wages are base salary. Equity, bonus and benefits are not in either source, so senior roles at companies that pay heavily in stock look lower here than on self-reported sites.

How often is it updated?

Job boards are read every Wednesday; a range that changes is logged with the old and new value, and a posting that closes stays on file as closed. H-1B wages are loaded each quarter when the Department of Labor publishes a new disclosure file. Past weeks and quarters are never rewritten.

Why is a company missing?

Salaries reads only public job boards, and skips any company whose robots.txt asks automated readers to stay out of its site or its careers pages. Companies without a public Greenhouse, Ashby or Lever board appear only through their H-1B filings. Use Suggest a missing company to propose one.

Data, AI and engineering salaries by title

The brief · Wed Nov 4

OpenAI and Anthropic continue to dominate the market for AI roles, offering top-end base salaries reaching $850k for research and engineering positions. Anduril Industries added 543 new roles, representing the highest volume of hiring activity among tracked firms. Conversely, OpenAI and Esri closed significant numbers of postings, suggesting shifts in their immediate headcount requirements.

Pay by role

posted median, middle half

1Research EngineerWrites the code that makes research run: training runs, experiments, infrastructure.$340k 2Head of AILeads the AI or ML group below the C-suite: VP, director or head.$330k 3Member of Technical StaffA deliberately flat title from Bell Labs, revived by AI labs for engineers and researchers alike.$306k 4Agent EngineerBuilds LLM agents that plan and call tools, and the harnesses that keep them reliable.$285k 5Head of DataLeads a company's data team: analytics, data science and data engineering.$280k 6Engineering ManagerManages a team of engineers: hiring, delivery and careers.$271k 7Machine Learning EngineerTrains, ships and maintains machine learning models in production.$265k 8Applied AI EngineerTurns frontier models into working products for specific customers or use cases.$262k 9MLOps EngineerRuns the training, serving and monitoring infrastructure that ML teams depend on.$254k 10Research ScientistDesigns and runs experiments to push what models can do; usually a PhD role.$246k 11Data ScientistUses statistics and models to answer questions with data; the "sexiest job" of 2012.$243k 12Applied ScientistResearch methods pointed at a product problem; Amazon made the title mainstream.$242k 13AI EngineerA software engineer who builds products on top of models rather than training them.$240k 14Evals EngineerMeasures model and agent quality: builds eval suites, graders and the dashboards teams ship against.$225k 15Software EngineerGeneral software engineering: backend, frontend, infrastructure and systems roles without a more specific title.$223k 16Full Stack EngineerWorks across the browser, the API and the database; the default startup hire.$222k 17Computer Vision EngineerBuilds models and systems that read images and video, from robots to retail.$218k 18Forward Deployed EngineerAn engineer who ships software inside a customer's environment, part builder and part consultant; Palantir coined it, AI labs made it common.$216k 19Site Reliability EngineerKeeps production up with software: on-call, SLOs and automation; Google's term.$213k 20Security EngineerFinds and fixes weaknesses in systems, code and cloud accounts.$212k 21Platform EngineerBuilds the internal platform other engineers deploy on: clusters, CI, paved roads.$203k 22Data EngineerBuilds the pipelines, warehouses and platforms that move and store data.$195k 23Analytics EngineerModels raw data into clean, tested tables (usually with dbt) for analysts and dashboards; named by dbt Labs around 2019.$195k 24Solutions EngineerThe technical half of a sale: demos, proofs of concept and integration help.$194k 25Developer AdvocateRepresents developers to a company and the company to developers: docs, demos, talks.$192k 26Design EngineerHalf designer, half front-end engineer: prototypes and ships polished interfaces.$187k 27DevOps EngineerAutomates builds, deploys and infrastructure; the title that took over from sysadmin.$165k 28Data AnalystAnswers business questions with SQL, dashboards and spreadsheets.$149k 29Product EngineerA full-stack engineer who owns product decisions too, not just tickets.$126k

Every role, with the H-1B wages →

The ladder

posted, then H-1B certified

Entry55 posted · H-1B $129k, 3,487 filings$143k

Mid73 posted · H-1B $170k, 8,405 filings$131k

Senior1,327 posted · H-1B $208k, 6,040 filings$216k

Staff773 posted · H-1B $244k, 1,274 filings$260k

Principal159 posted · H-1B $257k, 351 filings$316k

Manager321 posted · H-1B $249k, 1,748 filings$263k

Director and up33 posted · H-1B $309k, 70 filings$296k

Not stated1,542 posted · H-1B $195k, 28,499 filings$215k

The bar is the middle half of the pay and the mark the median, on one scale for the whole board: $125k to $350k. Roles rank once five postings or more state a range.

H-1B wages, by employer and role →

What changed

boards read, ranges moved

Range movedNov 4

MongoDB

Raised the pay range for Staff Engineer - Netsuite Business Systems: now $151k to $297k, was $137k to $270k. Posting ↗

And 6 more: Principal Security Engineer; Staff Engineer, Query Execution; Senior Software Engineer, Replication; and 3 others.

Range movedNov 4

Lowered the pay range for Senior Software Engineer - NEO Reliability: now $175k to $225k, was $200k to $300k. Posting ↗

And 3 more: Senior Software Engineer - Product; Staff Systems Engineer - Camera; Senior Systems Engineer - Network.

Range movedNov 4

Linear

Added a pay range to Senior / Staff Security Engineer: $204k to $264k. Posting ↗

And 3 more: Analytics Engineer; Product Engineer; Senior / Staff Product Engineer.

Range movedNov 4

Waymo

Raised the pay range for Tech Lead Manager, Data Engineer: now $298k to $368k, was $251k to $310k. Posting ↗

And 2 more: Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Scenes, Traffic Controls; Staff/Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer - World Modeling, Simulation.

Range movedNov 4

Airwallex

Lowered the pay range for Senior Software Engineer, Productivity: now $142k to $220k, was $158k to $245k. Posting ↗

And 1 more: Staff Software Engineer, Productivity.

Range movedNov 4

Blacksmith

Lowered the pay range for Staff Product Engineer: now $280k to $340k, was $280k to $380k. Posting ↗

And 1 more: Staff Systems Engineer.

Range movedNov 4

PagerDuty

Added a pay range to Forward Deployed Engineer (SDEV): $191k to $289k. Posting ↗

And 1 more: Forward Deployed Engineer (SDEV).

Range movedNov 4

Harvey

Raised the pay range for Staff Frontend Platform Engineer: now $231k to $340k, was $193k to $290k. Posting ↗

And 1 more: Staff Software Engineer, Full Stack - NYC.

Range movedNov 4

Okta

Raised the pay range for Engineering Manager, Okta Identity Governance: now $210k to $288k, was $204k to $281k. Posting ↗

And 1 more: Manager, Site Reliability Engineering (Auth0).

Range movedNov 4

OpenAI

Lowered the pay range for Engineering Manager, Preparedness: now $405k to $445k, was $445k to $510k. Posting ↗

And 1 more: RTL Design Engineer - Interconnect & Network Datapath.

Range movedNov 4

Databricks

Raised the pay range for Sr. Staff Software Engineer, AI Native Web Platform: now $234k to $322k, was $198k to $273k. Posting ↗

And 1 more: Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer - Public Sector.

Range movedNov 4

Robinhood

Lowered the pay range for Offensive Security Engineer: now $157k to $185k, was $217k to $255k. Posting ↗

And 1 more: Senior Software Engineer, AI Infra.

Range movedNov 4

Zilliz

Widened the pay range for Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Reliability: now $150k to $240k, was $175k to $225k. Posting ↗

Range movedNov 4

The New York Times

Raised the pay range for Staff Software Engineer, Application Delivery: now $162k to $210k, was $162k to $195k. Posting ↗

Range movedNov 4

OpenRouter

Raised the pay range for Engineering Manager, Provider Ecosystem: now $275k to $325k, was $245k to $295k. Posting ↗

Every change, going back →

What data and AI roles pay

What to do

Pay by role

The ladder

What changed