Data from 1000 live listings

AI Engineer Salary Guide 2026

Real compensation data pulled from active AI engineering job postings — not surveys. Full-time salaries are annual. Contract rates are hourly.

By job type

Full-time salaries are annual. Contract rates are per hour.

Full-time

$155K–$223K

Based on 167 listings

Full-time roles only.

Remote

+premium

$161K–$224K

Based on 22 listings

On-site / Hybrid

$154K–$223K

Based on 145 listings

Full-time roles only, averaged across all seniority levels.

Stack	Range	Avg max	Roles
1Qdrant	$220K – $353K	$353K	3
2Ray	$210K – $350K	$350K	2
3Rust	$199K – $305K	$305K	5
4C++	$179K – $277K	$277K	4
5Transformers	$161K – $248K	$248K	6
6Go	$170K – $246K	$246K	30
7Airflow	$159K – $245K	$245K	8
8Hugging Face	$148K – $238K	$238K	14
9TypeScript	$164K – $234K	$234K	44
10MLflow	$173K – $229K	$229K	3
11LLMs	$158K – $226K	$226K	135
12Spark	$144K – $224K	$224K	13
13Weaviate	$139K – $222K	$222K	12
14Kubernetes	$143K – $221K	$221K	32
15Java	$159K – $220K	$220K	17

Salaries are averages across all seniority levels and company sizes from active listings.

Weekly digest with salary data included on every listing.