Roles at frontier labs
The jobs, one by one
Updated October 2, 2026
What each job asks for, what it pays and which labs posted it, counted from the labs' own postings.
- 22
- roles described
- 1,837
- recorded postings
- $439k
- top median base

These counts describe the October 2, 2026 snapshot; postings need a fresh check. Explore opportunities.
Research
-
Research Engineer
- Recorded
- 158
- Median base
- $413k
- No degree
- 56%
Asks most for
Evals and benchmarks · Reinforcement learning · Post-training and fine-tuning
See the role →
-
Research Scientist
- Recorded
- 173
- Median base
- $413k
- No degree
- 35%
Asks most for
Evals and benchmarks · Post-training and fine-tuning · Publications
See the role →
-
Member of Technical Staff
- Recorded
- 95
- Median base
- $310k
- No degree
- 89%
Asks most for
Inference and serving · Evals and benchmarks · Post-training and fine-tuning
See the role →
Research specialties
-
Post-Training Researcher and Engineer
- Recorded
- 47
- Median base
- $413k
- No degree
- 62%
Asks most for
Post-training and fine-tuning · Reinforcement learning · Evals and benchmarks
See the role →
-
Reinforcement Learning Researcher and Engineer
- Recorded
- 44
- Median base
- $413k
- No degree
- 82%
Asks most for
Reinforcement learning · Agents and tool use · Post-training and fine-tuning
See the role →
-
Pretraining Researcher and Engineer
- Recorded
- 20
- Median base
- $413k
- No degree
- 55%
Asks most for
Pretraining and scaling laws · Inference and serving · PyTorch
See the role →
-
Evaluations Researcher and Engineer
- Recorded
- 22
- Median base
- $353k
- No degree
- 82%
Asks most for
Evals and benchmarks · Agents and tool use · Post-training and fine-tuning
See the role →
-
AI Safety and Alignment Researcher
- Recorded
- 54
- Median base
- $398k
- No degree
- 61%
Asks most for
Safety, red-teaming and misuse · Evals and benchmarks · Agents and tool use
See the role →
-
Interpretability Researcher
- Recorded
- 6
- Median base
- $439k
- No degree
- 67%
Asks most for
Interpretability · Pretraining and scaling laws · Multimodal models
See the role →
-
Multimodal Researcher and Engineer
- Recorded
- 45
- Median base
- $310k
- No degree
- 53%
Asks most for
Multimodal models · Evals and benchmarks · Publications
See the role →
-
Robotics Researcher and Engineer
- Recorded
- 37
- Median base
- $320k
- No degree
- 35%
Asks most for
Multimodal models · Evals and benchmarks · Reinforcement learning
See the role →
-
AI Agents Engineer
- Recorded
- 105
- Median base
- $314k
- No degree
- 80%
Asks most for
Agents and tool use · Evals and benchmarks · Working with coding agents
See the role →
-
AI for Science Researcher
- Recorded
- 23
- Median base
- $310k
- No degree
- 26%
Asks most for
Evals and benchmarks · Publications · Agents and tool use
See the role →
Applied AI
-
Forward Deployed Engineer
- Recorded
- 131
- Median base
- $243k
- No degree
- 89%
Asks most for
Agents and tool use · Evals and benchmarks · Inference and serving
See the role →
-
Applied AI Engineer
- Recorded
- 118
- Median base
- $247k
- No degree
- 92%
Asks most for
Agents and tool use · Evals and benchmarks · Inference and serving
See the role →
-
AI Solutions Architect
- Recorded
- 68
- Median base
- $278k
- No degree
- 94%
Asks most for
Evals and benchmarks · Working with coding agents · Agents and tool use
See the role →
Systems and infrastructure
-
Machine Learning Engineer
- Recorded
- 60
- Median base
- $323k
- No degree
- 70%
Asks most for
Inference and serving · Statistics and experimental design · Agents and tool use
See the role →
-
Inference Engineer
- Recorded
- 55
- Median base
- $325k
- No degree
- 80%
Asks most for
Inference and serving · GPU kernels · JAX
See the role →
-
ML Infrastructure Engineer
- Recorded
- 61
- Median base
- $372k
- No degree
- 74%
Asks most for
Inference and serving · Distributed training · GPU kernels
See the role →
-
GPU Kernel and Performance Engineer
- Recorded
- 40
- Median base
- $396k
- No degree
- 83%
Asks most for
Inference and serving · GPU kernels · JAX
See the role →
Fellowships and internships
-
AI Research Internship
- Recorded
- 23
- Median base
- —
- No degree
- 43%
Asks most for
Publications · Evals and benchmarks · PyTorch
See the role →
-
AI Research Fellowships, Residencies and Postdocs
- Recorded
- 23
- Median base
- $160k
- No degree
- 65%
Asks most for
Agents and tool use · Publications · Math for ML
See the role →
The report card
Every role, side by side
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.