Side-by-side distribution
AI Engineer
$200,000
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 39.1%
- Live roles
- 5,349
MLOps
$191,750
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 25.2%
- Live roles
- 139
Highest-paying jobs
Lead Software Engineer, Generative AI
Senior Software Engineer, Generative AI
Senior/Staff Backend Engineer, Applied AI
Senior/Staff Full Stack Engineer, Applied AI
Backend Engineer, AI
Machine Learning Engineer - Fraud Risk
Research Engineer, Machine Learning (RL Velocity)
Research Engineer, Machine Learning (Reinforcement Learning)
Research Engineer, Machine Learning (Reinforcement Learning)
Research Engineer, Machine Learning (RL Velocity)
Highest-paying jobs
Senior Machine Learning Engineer, DevOps/SRE
Staff Machine Learning Operations Engineer
ML Platform / MLOps Engineer
Senior Data Engineer, MLOps [Remote-US]
Senior, ML Engineer - ML Ops Framework
Senior, ML Engineer - ML Ops Framework
Senior Machine Learning/MLOps Engineer
Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer
Staff ML/LLM Ops Engineer
Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Engineer 3 - NLP/MLOPS
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
Mindrift
|
$72,800 | 47 |
OpenAI
|
$247,000 | 36 |
Unity Technologies
|
$198,550 | 34 |
Pinterest
|
$260,867 | 22 |
Motional
|
$200,500 | 22 |
| SE Sezzle | $70,499 | 22 |
Handshake
|
$252,500 | 20 |
Databricks
|
$221,553 | 20 |
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
Grafana Labs
|
$157,157 | 4 |
|
Garner Health
|
$297,500 | 2 |
|
Torc Robotics
|
$249,000 | 2 |
|
Profluent
|
$265,000 | 1 |
|
Quanata
|
$256,500 | 1 |
|
Anduril Industries
|
$256,000 | 1 |
|
Roku
|
$254,875 | 1 |
|
LVT
|
$242,650 | 1 |
MLOps salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| New York | $270,500 | 3 |
AI Engineer vs MLOps: which pays more?
The median for AI Engineer is $200,000 per year (typically $162,000–$237,500), versus $191,750 for MLOps ($153,940–$225,688). That puts AI Engineer about 4% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so AI Engineer and MLOps are compared on equal terms regardless of the currency each role was originally posted in. Only roles that publish a salary range feed the medians; numbers refresh every few hours as new roles post and older ones close, so this comparison reflects the market right now rather than a fixed survey. Use it as a directional benchmark when weighing one path against the other.