AI Eng pays 2x higher than SWE
Salaries have ~10-15% premium, but new hire grants have ~100%+ premium
In recent flash polls, large tech companies told us about half of them differentiate AI into its own job family, and those that do set AI pay ranges with a 10-15% premium.
That seems to be the case for salaries, but not for stock.
I used Compa to dig into offer data this past weekend and compare the two job families. I looked across all individual contributors, and isolated down to a few individual levels.
Here’s what base salary looks like over the past 12 months:
That generally lines up with the flash poll responses.
But then I compared AI and SWE new hire grants over the same time period, and a totally different picture emerges:
AI new hire grants are 2x greater than SWE.
The picture holds across time, too:
Why is this happening?
It’s hard to say why, but it seems clear that the market is establishing a premium on AI, mostly through stock grants.
Most companies’ salary ranges are more rigid than stock (tighter min/max spreads). It would be easier for the compa-ratio to creep up on stock grants than salaries.
And in this tough market, it be easier to spend more on stock than cash as companies manage costs. And easier to get a stock exception approved.
Or perhaps it’s some lurking variable, like the average AI engineer is more risk-tolerant than the average SWE, or the average company hiring AI engineers pays more in stock than those that aren’t.
This is why offers are cool
For better or worse, employee data and surveys are fundamentally backwards-looking, and usually stable. When the market shifts quickly, or a new job emerges, it takes a long time to see it in the survey data.
With offer data, you can detect new trends much faster.
Comp teams are still split on whether to categorize AI as a job or a skill, and most update their ranges annually. Therefore, I suspect that many reqs are getting opened under a SWE job code with an AI title and skill requirements.
Since Compa data is based on offers, and matches against a combination of job codes and job posting titles, you can peer through the noise.
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