How much can artificial intelligence (A.I.) jobs pay?
That’s a crucial question as companies everywhere rush to integrate A.I. and machine learning into their respective tech stacks. In a twist that should come as no surprise to anyone monitoring tech salaries, some of the biggest names in tech offer some of the biggest A.I.-related paychecks. For example, a recent Netflix posting for a machine learning product manager job lists the salary range at $300,000 to $900,000.
That’s obviously quite a spread, with the final salary number determined by a variety of factors, including a candidate’s skills and previous experience. Netflix is also well-known for paying extraordinarily high salaries—with the caveat that employees are expected to deliver outstanding performance in return.
Netflix’s other A.I. and machine-learning jobs can pay as much as $750,000. “As researchers, we innovate using machine learning in many areas where we prototype, design, implement, evaluate, and productionize models and algorithms through both offline experiments and online A/B testing,” reads a note on Netflix’s research site.
Netflix isn’t the only tech company paying high salaries for A.I. experts, of course: Amazon, Upwork, Match Group (which produces the dating app Hinge), and Google all pay generous six-figure salaries, according to one recent breakdown. Financial firms like Goldman Sachs and mega-retailers like Walmart are also willing to pay top dollar for anyone who’s mastered a machine learning framework or large language model (LLM) training.
Huge pay for A.I. skills isn’t new. Back in ye olden days of 2017, Tom Eck, then the CTO of industry platforms at IBM, told the audience at the Markets Media’s Summer Trading event in New York that top-tier A.I. researchers “are getting paid the salaries of NFL quarterbacks, which tells you the demand and the perceived value.” Companies like Google were paying A.I. researchers enough to retire early.
The difference is that A.I. and machine learning have become increasingly mainstream. In theory, that will result in a proliferation of high-paying jobs necessitating A.I. skills. If you’re interested in becoming a machine learning and A.I. engineer, you’ll need to learn a core set of programming languages, frameworks, and abstract concepts—and you’ll need to constantly update your knowledge as the industry evolves. But if you can master all of that, you can unlock extraordinarily high compensation.
