Machine Learning Engineer salary
What a machine learning engineer actually earns, from 584 live job postings blended with the official US OEWS (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics) wage anchor. Pick a market for its median and range, then read the seniority split, the trend, and the country comparison below. Updated 2026-07-23.
Switch the market above to see machine learning engineer pay in the 3 countries our sources cover, each with its own cost of living. The trend, seniority, and state detail below are United States data, where the official record runs deepest.
What the number means
Machine-learning engineering is where the AI wave shows up in a paycheck. The blended US median is about 127,000 dollars, with a top of band stretching past 183,000 for people who can put models into production, and the trend since 2021 is 23 percent, among the fastest on the board. The role sits on the same SOC code as several design jobs in the official data, so the OEWS anchor understates it; read the posted band as the truer signal here. Unemployment is 3.3 percent, in line with software broadly. What commands the premium is the half of the job that is not modeling: deployment, monitoring, retraining, the reliability engineering that keeps a model useful after the demo. For a data scientist, that production gap is the boundary where the next raise lives, and it is real software engineering rather than more modeling.
Open machine learning engineer roles
Live openings tagged to this occupation, from company career pages and remote boards. Apply at the source.
- Machine Learning Engineer - ML Agents and PlanningZoox · Foster City, CA$189k–$270kJul 23
- Lead Machine Learning EngineerThoughtworks · CanadaRemoteJul 22
- Machine Learning Engineer - Computer VisionCompanyCam · United States$220k–$250kRemoteJul 22
- Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Developer Advocacy | Canada | RemoteGrafanalabs · Canada (Remote)$164kRemoteJul 22
- Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Developer Advocacy | Germany | RemoteGrafanalabs · Germany (Remote)RemoteJul 22
- Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Developer Advocacy | Ireland | RemoteGrafanalabs · Republic of Ireland (Remote)RemoteJul 22
By seniority
Posted-median pay by seniority signal in the title, from our corpus. Noisy at the edges where sample sizes are small.
By country
- United States$116,154 – $193,687 · median $129,166
- Canada$114,549 – $171,903 · median $142,651
- United Kingdom$76,330 – $124,621 · median $91,985
Top-paying US states
OEWS median by state, highest first.
- Californiamedian $178,847
- Washingtonmedian $126,960
- New Yorkmedian $121,700
- Massachusettsmedian $107,560
- Hawaiimedian $105,560
- Coloradomedian $103,990
Is your offer fair?
Run a specific number through FairElephant, which weighs it against this data, your location, and remote market rates.
Move into or out of machine learning engineer
- data scientist → machine learning engineermeasured route
Related salaries
- Data Scientist salary$148,609 median
- Software Engineer salary$181,991 median
- Data Engineer salary$124,685 median
Quick answers
How much do machine learning engineers make?
The blended US median is about 127,000 dollars, with the top of band past 183,000 for production and LLM-serving skills. Pay grew 23 percent since 2021.
Do ML engineers make more than data scientists?
At the top of band, yes: the premium is for production skills (deployment, monitoring, retraining) rather than modeling alone. See the data-scientist-to-ML-engineer route.
Is machine learning engineering a growing field?
Among the fastest-growing on our board: a 23 percent pay rise since 2021, driven by demand for people who can ship models, not just prototype them.
Method: bands are the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of live US postings with stated pay, shrunk toward the official OEWS anchor by sample size (the “blended” figure). Trend is the OEWS annual median for SOC (Standard Occupational Classification) code 15-1255. Unemployment is the 2025 BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) CPS (Current Population Survey) annual-average rate for “Software developers.” Live corpus 584 observations, 2026-07-23. Definitions in the glossary.