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Roles at frontier labs

The jobs, one by one

Updated Partial update · October 8, 2026

Recorded postings, not a live vacancy count. Partial update: some sources retain earlier observations; each listing has its own check date.

What each job asks for, what it pays and which labs posted it, counted from the labs' own postings.

22
roles described
1,827
recorded postings
$438k
top median base
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Research

Research specialties

Applied AI

Systems and infrastructure

Fellowships and internships

The report card

Every role, side by side

Role Recorded Median base No degree requirement stated PhD required Years, median
Research Scientist 175 $413k 34% 18% 3
Research Engineer 157 $413k 57% 6% 4
Forward Deployed Engineer 134 $243k 90% 0% 4
Applied AI Engineer 114 $247k 91% 1% 4
AI Agents Engineer 100 $330k 79% 5% 5
Member of Technical Staff 93 $310k 89% 3% 5
AI Solutions Architect 69 $278k 94% 0% 5
Machine Learning Engineer 61 $324k 70% 3% 5
ML Infrastructure Engineer 59 $361k 73% 2% 5
AI Safety and Alignment Researcher 57 $400k 63% 5% 4
Inference Engineer 55 $325k 80% 0% 5
Post-Training Researcher and Engineer 45 $413k 60% 4% 3
Reinforcement Learning Researcher and Engineer 44 $413k 82% 2% 3
Multimodal Researcher and Engineer 44 $310k 52% 14% 5
GPU Kernel and Performance Engineer 40 $396k 83% 3% 3
Robotics Researcher and Engineer 35 $320k 31% 11% 2
AI Research Internship 26 — 38% 27% 1
AI for Science Researcher 23 $310k 26% 39% 5
Evaluations Researcher and Engineer 22 $345k 77% 5% 3
Pretraining Researcher and Engineer 21 $413k 57% 5% 2
AI Research Fellowships, Residencies and Postdocs 8 — 38% 63% 1
Interpretability Researcher 5 $438k 60% 0% 3.5

Median base is the midpoint of each U.S. band a posting publishes; equity and bonus are not included. A dash means too few postings publish the number.