AI Engineer Salary Trends in the US (2026 - 2022)

Evidence boundary: AI Engineer means production engineering for model integration, RAG, agents, evaluation, safety, LLMOps, inference, and AI infrastructure. Generic software engineering, Data Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Research Scientist, and prompt-only titles are excluded unless a row is explicitly described here as a secondary proxy. The 2026 national row is anchored to AI Engineer-title salary samples and disclosed employer base ranges; the broad current sources disagree materially because job boards, employee reports, and growth-company postings cover different geographies and seniority mixes, so their percentile samples are kept separate rather than pooled. BLS has no standalone AI Engineer series. The 2022-2024 national tails and thin historical level rows therefore use clearly disclosed secondary proxies from Computer and Information Research Scientists and, only for senior leadership scope, Computer and Information Systems Managers; these are not measured AI Engineer statistics. The 2025 national median is a broad AI-position posting median used only as a labeled secondary benchmark, while direct AI Engineer guides and postings define the year range and level bands. Historical rows combine contemporaneous AI Engineer guides, exact-title postings, available Salary.com AI Engineer III-V history, and disclosed proxy percentiles; they are evidence-bounded benchmarks, not a synthetic back-cast, evenly spaced ladder, or a single multiplier applied across levels. Where a source supplied a range but no midpoint, the displayed median is the arithmetic midpoint of that disclosed range or evidence envelope. The 2022-2023 intern rows repeat the earliest 2024 exact-title annualized internship benchmark because no credible older AI Engineer Intern observation was found, so no trend is implied. The 2022-2025 remote and onsite rows repeat the national range where reliable AI Engineer-only work-mode splits were unavailable; no remote discount was invented. National rows primarily describe individual-contributor AI Engineer pay, while the architect and VP rows use distinct principal and executive postings and may exceed the national maximum. All table pay is annual USD base salary; intern hourly postings are annualized at 2,080 hours, hourly fields equal annual pay divided by 2,080, and bonus, equity, and other total-compensation elements are excluded from base bands. Each multiplier is the level’s 2026 median divided by the 2026 national median and is descriptive only.