2026-07-01
ML / AI Engineer is now the highest-paying engineering title in tech. Here's what 2,284 open roles tell us.
2,284 open ML/AI Engineer roles. 883 companies. Median $215k USD. We scraped public ATS feeds directly — here's the full data breakdown.
Every company is claiming to be an AI company. The hiring data tells you which ones actually mean it.
I track ML and AI Engineer roles daily by scraping public ATS feeds directly — no LinkedIn, no stale aggregators. Here's the full picture as of July 1, 2026.
What is an ML / AI Engineer?
The title covers a spectrum: from researchers who train foundation models to engineers who wire LLM APIs into production products. What unites them is that their primary output is a working ML system — a model, a pipeline, an inference stack — rather than a feature built on top of someone else's AI.
In 2024 this was a rarefied title. By mid-2026, 883 companies are actively hiring for it. The demand has outrun the supply of people who can actually do the work.
The data: 2,284 open ML/AI Engineer roles across 883 companies
2,284 active roles. 883 companies. 296 new roles added in the last 7 days.
That's 42 new ML/AI Engineer openings per day, from a base that already dwarfs most engineering specialisations.
Who's hiring most aggressively
| Company | Open ML/AI roles |
|---|---|
| NVIDIA | 101 |
| Bjak | 56 |
| Anthropic | 33 |
| Mistral | 33 |
| Sezzle | 33 |
| 28 | |
| 24 |
NVIDIA at the top is not a surprise — they're building the hardware layer and the software stack simultaneously, and their CUDA/GPU ecosystem requires ML engineers who understand both. Anthropic and Mistral represent the frontier model labs competing on research and applied engineering talent at the same time.
The surprises: Bjak (insurtech) and Sezzle (fintech) both cracking the top 5. Every industry is deploying ML now — not just tech.
What they pay
Of 2,284 open roles, 860 (37.7%) have a salary range published. Among USD roles:
- Median: $215,000/year
- 25th percentile: $184,775
- 75th percentile: $257,250
This is the highest median of any engineering title we track. The floor is high ($185k P25) and the ceiling is genuinely open-ended — frontier AI lab roles regularly clear $300k+ total comp with equity.
The 37.7% disclosure rate is consistent with premium engineering roles: companies posting salary ranges know it's a recruiting advantage.
Remote vs. office
ML/AI engineering skews toward in-office or hybrid more than most roles — GPU clusters, research collaboration, and the sheer density of AI talent in SF/NYC make location matter. If you're optimising for fully remote, filter explicitly; the board shows work mode per listing.
Freshness: 296 new roles in the last 7 days
The market is accelerating, not stabilising. 296 new ML/AI Engineer roles appeared in the past week — roughly one new opening every 40 minutes, around the clock.
What this tells us about the ML/AI market
1. $215k median makes this the single most valuable engineering title in the market right now. Not total comp at a frontier lab — the median, across 860 roles with disclosed salary, across 883 companies. The floor has moved dramatically in two years.
2. The demand is genuinely broad. NVIDIA and Anthropic are obvious. But Reddit, Pinterest, Bjak, Sezzle — the signal is that ML engineering is now a standard function at scale companies across every vertical, not just an AI-first company phenomenon.
3. 37.7% salary disclosure is above-average for tech. AI-era companies trend toward transparency, and ML roles in particular — where companies compete hard for a shallow talent pool — increasingly publish ranges as a recruitment signal.
4. 296 new roles per week means this market won't equilibrate soon. The supply of engineers who can actually train, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy ML systems hasn't caught up with the demand. That's why the pay is where it is.
The board
latchhire.com/board/ml_ai — updated daily from ATS feeds. Every role links directly to the original posting.
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Data pulled 2026-07-01. Active roles only. Salary figures USD only; international roles excluded from median. "New in 7d" = first seen in the past 7 days.