Recomputed every morning · 2026-08-22

What AI evals engineers actually get paid

Nobody publishes this. So here it is, straight from 183 live job postings that state a salary, across 37 companies.

$200k – $328k

The median band. A quarter of roles sit below $212k at the midpoint, a quarter above $340k. The full range runs from $55k to $850k.

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607Live roles

72Companies hiring

166Remote-friendly

$328kMedian top of band

111Posted in 30 days

Post-training & RL pays the most

A $159k gap separates it from human data at the bottom. Worth knowing which side of that line a role sits on before you take the interview, because the titles rarely tell you.

published bandmedian of midpoints

Post-training & RLn=59

$225k–$440k

Alignment & interpretabilityn=20

$214k–$333k

Evals & benchmarksn=62

$181k–$300k

Red team & safeguardsn=14

$216k–$310k

Eval toolingn=8

$175k–$240k

Human datan=20

$133k–$208k

By company

Companies with at least three published bands. The bar spans their lowest advertised floor to their highest advertised ceiling, so a wide bar means they hire across a wide seniority range, not that any one role pays that spread.

lowest floor to highest ceilingmedian of midpoints

Thinking Machines Labn=4

$350k–$475k

OpenAIn=50

$177k–$555k

Mercorn=9

$130k–$600k

Character AIn=8

$150k–$400k

Perplexityn=8

$200k–$485k

xAIn=11

$100k–$600k

Prime Intellectn=14

$150k–$350k

Decagonn=6

$165k–$400k

Together AIn=4

$200k–$290k

Scale AIn=4

$216k–$270k

Patronus AIn=3

$125k–$300k

Ai2n=3

$119k–$261k

CoreWeave (Weights & Biases)n=5

$177k–$333k

LangChainn=8

$145k–$270k

Distyl AIn=4

$150k–$250k

Microsoft AIn=3

$119k–$303k

Harveyn=3

$150k–$340k

FAR.AIn=3

$100k–$250k

HumanSignaln=8

$55k–$140k

The highest bands on the board

Role	Company	Band
Member of Technical Staff	Redwood Research	$350k – $850k
Member of Technical Staff - Post-Training and RL	xAI	$180k – $600k
Member of Technical Staff, Deeptune Environments	Mercor	$220k – $600k
Research Engineer / Research Scientist- Personal AGI (Post Training)	OpenAI	$295k – $555k
Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Personal AGI, Memory	OpenAI	$295k – $555k
Research Engineer / Research Scientist -Personal AGI, Proactivity	OpenAI	$295k – $555k
Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Personal AGI, Personalization	OpenAI	$295k – $555k
Research Engineer/Research Scientist - Personal AGI, North Stars	OpenAI	$295k – $555k

The bands are so wide they barely mean anything

These are single job postings, not seniority ladders. A range this wide tells a candidate almost nothing about what the offer will be, which is worth knowing before you spend a week interviewing.

Role	Company	Band	Spread
Member of Technical Staff	Redwood Research	$350k – $850k	$500k
Member of Technical Staff - Post-Training and RL	xAI	$180k – $600k	$420k
Member of Technical Staff, Deeptune Environments	Mercor	$220k – $600k	$380k
Data Scientist	Mercor	$130k – $500k	$370k
Machine Learning Engineer, Frontier Data Products	Mercor	$130k – $500k	$370k

Only 30% of these jobs say what they pay

183 of 607 live postings state a band. The rest make you ask. Everything above is drawn only from the ones that tell you, so if publishers skew toward the better-paying end — and they usually do — treat these as an optimistic read rather than a market average.

Method. Every figure recomputed from the 607 roles live on this board today, collected from company career pages. Annual USD base only: hourly contract rates and non-USD bands are excluded rather than converted, because mixing them would quietly distort every number here. Equity and bonus are excluded, which matters most at the frontier labs where they are the larger half of the offer. Track medians use the median of each posting's midpoint. Company bars span the lowest floor to the highest ceiling that company advertises. Categories need three or more published bands to appear at all. This page rebuilds every morning, so these numbers move.

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