Salary guide
| Measure | Annual pay (USD) |
|---|---|
| 25th percentile | $216,000 |
| Median | $248,000 |
| 75th percentile | $310,000 |
| Lowest listing | $110,000 |
| Highest listing | $850,000 |
| Listings counted | 92 |
| Company | Open listings | Median pay |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA | 26 | $216,000 |
| OpenAI | 13 | $440,000 |
| Anthropic | 9 | $310,000 |
| Anduril Industries | 7 | $192,000 |
| Nuro | 4 | $266,000 |
| Waymo | 4 | $238,000 |
| Luma AI | 3 | $295,000 |
| Snorkel AI | 3 | $288,000 |
| Country | Currency | Listings | Median pay | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | USD | 87 | $248,000 | $216,000 to $310,000 |
The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models.
OpenAI · 21d ago
The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models.
OpenAI · 1y ago
The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models.
Zillow has the richest housing market data in the industry. You help us build out a foundational model that leverages a representation of who is in the market, what they’ll pay, and how that demand clears against supply.
OpenAI · 14d ago
The Human Flourishing team’s mission is to ensure AI systems understand and advance human flourishing. As AI becomes more capable and plays a larger role in people’s lives, we want its human benefits to grow with its capabilities.
The Health team, within OpenAI’s broader Post Training organization, has a mission to ensure AGI improves health for all humanity. Improving human health will be one of the defining impacts of AGI.
The Personalization-Memory team, within OpenAI's broader Post Training organization, is focused on developing agents that can learn from prior interactions in order to become more helpful and efficient over time.
OpenAI · 3mo ago
The Personalization-Memory team, within OpenAI's broader Post Training organization, is focused on developing agents that can learn from prior interactions in order to become more helpful and efficient over time.
The Post Training team is responsible for training and improving pre-trained models to be deployed into ChatGPT, the API, and potential future products.
The Post Training team seeks to empower all of humanity to benefit from frontier intelligence in whatever way they choose. We are responsible for training models to deploy to millions of users globally via ChatGPT, the API, and future products.
OpenAI · 11mo ago
The Post Training team is responsible for training and improving pre-trained models to be deployed into ChatGPT, the API, and potential future products.
Our team is organized around the north star goal of building an AI scientist – a system capable of solving the long term reasoning challenges and basic capabilities necessary to push the scientific and technological frontier.
Mercor · 1mo ago
As a Research Scientist at Mercor, you will work at the intersection of research and engineering on frontier post-training. You will develop new training and evaluation methods, test them through rigorous experiments, and implement successful approaches at scale.
We’re looking for a Research Scientist to lead the design of the next generation of APEX benchmarks and the expert-built datasets behind them.
The RL and Reasoning team drives the core reasoning paradigm and has created groundbreaking innovations such as o1 and o3. They focus on pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning research, building next-generation generative models, and deploying them at scale.
As a Research Scientist here, you will develop innovative machine learning techniques and advance the research agenda of the team you work on, while also collaborating with peers across the organization.
Build and scale data generation pipelines using LLM-based methods combined with automated quality evaluation. resulting in datasets to improve both initial training and fine-tuning of LLMs such as Nemotron.
Drive research in agent post-training and reinforcement learning, shaping the technical direction of ambitious research programs grounded in observability and security.
Drive research in foundation models, world models, and multimodal learning, shaping the technical direction of ambitious research programs grounded in observability.
You'll make Luma's multimodal models fast — profiling and optimizing GPU, CPU, and accelerator code so they train efficiently and deploy at scale without sacrificing quality. You'll write the kernels and operations that get the most out of the hardware.
Luma AI · 1mo ago
You'll build the distributed systems that train Luma's large-scale multimodal models across thousands of GPUs, so researchers can focus on innovation on top of reliable, efficient, scalable infrastructure.
You'll build the systems that make reinforcement learning work at frontier scale — coupling policy optimization with large fleets of inference workers, agentic environments, and the reward and verification systems that turn model behavior into learning signal.
As an AI research scientist, you'll be at the center of that work. You'll drive a high-impact research agenda focused on large language models, agentic reasoning, and the system-level capabilities that make AI genuinely useful at enterprise scale.
We are seeking a Recruiting Research Scientist to join our People Data Solutions team.
In this role, you will collaborate closely with researchers and engineers on the Learned Behavior teams to tackle plan generation challenges in autonomous driving.
We're looking for a Research Scientist to work on reinforcement learning for training and aligning large language models.
Lead research in Quantum Machine Learning, Quantum Optimization, Quantum Simulation, and Quantum AI . Develop quantum and hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for applications including: Financial forecasting and analytics. Portfolio optimization and risk management.
As an AI research scientist, you'll be at the center of that work. You'll drive a high-impact research agenda focused on large language models, agentic reasoning, and the system-level capabilities that make AI genuinely useful at enterprise scale.
Anthropic · 1mo ago
The team combines cutting-edge AI with hands-on biological research, positioning Anthropic at the forefront of AI-accelerated scientific discovery.
Anthropic · 13d ago
We're seeking a research scientist with deep expertise in antibody process development and manufacturing to join the team. Our goal is to speed up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude, and this role puts that mission into practice.
Anthropic · 13d ago
We're seeking a research scientist with deep expertise in therapeutic antibodies to join the team. Our goal is to speed up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude, and this role puts that mission into practice.
Anthropic · 17d ago
We're seeking a research scientist who combines deep chemistry knowledge with machine learning expertise to join the team. Our goal is to speed up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude, and this role puts that mission into practice.
We're seeking research scientists with deep medicinal chemistry expertise to join the team. Our goal is to speed up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude, and this role puts that mission into practice.
The team combines cutting-edge AI with hands-on biological research, positioning Anthropic at the forefront of AI-accelerated scientific discovery.
EliseAI is seeking world-class experts in Machine Learning and related fields to strengthen our expansive research team.
Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes.
Path-find technical innovations in Quantum Error Correction and Fault Tolerance, working with multi-functional teams in Product, Engineering, and Applied Research.
Conduct technical pathfinding and lead impactful research across fault-tolerant quantum computing, driving innovations from theory to practice in areas such as quantum error correction, logical architectures, compilation, synthesis, AI-driven optimization, and quantum system…
Research, design, and implement novel, large-scale generative AI methods. Publish original research. Collaborate with team members, research teams, as well as product teams. Speak at conferences and events. Transfer technology to product groups.
Design and architect AI/ML models—including deep neural networks, graph neural networks, transformers, and reinforcement-learning agents—for quantum error correction, syndrome decoding, logical operation synthesis, and real-time calibration in fault-tolerant quantum systems.
Research and develop open AI models for quantum system calibration to advance the state of the art and empower the quantum community to build on shared foundations.
Alignerr is Labelbox's human data organization — we produce the training data that frontier AI labs use to build their most capable models.
We are seeking a Staff Research Scientist to join our team and contribute to the development of next-generation AI models.
The mandate of the prediction team is to use advanced machine learning techniques to improve the behavior of the Nuro Driver.
Define research direction in Agentic AI and LLMs. Develop models : train, fine-tune, and align models for enterprise reasoning and tool use. Advance autonomous agents : drive state-of-the-art capabilities in multi-step reasoning and tool use.
We are looking for biological scientists to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems.
This role sits at the frontier of our research agenda. You will pursue open problems at the intersection of post-training methodology and performant inference, and then collaborate with research engineering to translate findings into production systems.
Develop scalable data curation and processing methods that improve model training and task-specific performance. Build production-ready AI systems using strong software engineering practices.
The median Research Scientist salary in our $100k+ listings is $248,000 a year, based on 92 live USD listings. The middle half of listings pays $216,000 to $310,000. These figures cover only listings that publish a salary of $100k+ or more, so they sit above pay for Research Scientist roles overall.
Individual $100k+ Research Scientist listings range from $110,000 to $850,000 a year. The 25th percentile of listing midpoints is $216,000 and the 75th percentile is $310,000.
The companies with the most open $100k+ Research Scientist listings are NVIDIA (26 listings, median $216,000), OpenAI (13 listings, median $440,000), Anthropic (9 listings, median $310,000), Anduril Industries (7 listings, median $192,000) and Nuro (4 listings, median $266,000).
The figures come from the salary ranges employers publish in their own job listings, collected from company career pages and applicant-tracking systems. Each listing counts once, at the midpoint of its range. Only USD listings go into the headline figures, and listings that are closed or stale are removed. The data was last refreshed on November 12, 2026.
Yes. Each listing is tagged remote, hybrid or on-site, and remote roles carry a region (US only, EMEA, APAC or global), so you can filter the live job list to the arrangement you want.
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