How much you can earn working at a big AI company in London
Key Points
- AI companies are expanding into London, and they are offering massive salaries as they outbid each other for talent.
- Anthropic is paying up to £630,000 per year for some positions, and has also launched a fellowship programme to court academic researchers.
- OpenAI is also paying handsomely for UK tech talent, and many companies are also sweetening pay packages with equity options and bonuses.
AI companies are offering massive salaries as they expand into London, with companies like Anthropic paying up to £630,000 per year.
London is fast becoming a new hub for tech giants, with many expanding their offices and staff in the city, and they are bringing with them salaries that would make many working in finance and insurance blush.
Companies like Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic are in a bidding war for tech talent, and London is quickly becoming the hub for this limited pool of researchers and engineers that can drive the development and training of their frontier models.
Last month, we looked at a newly opened position for a research engineer role at AI firm Anthropic, based out of its London office with a salary of up to £630,000 per year, including bonuses but not equity.
This is far from the only high-paying AI position in the city. Tech giants are on the hunt for new talent in London and are willing to pay heavily to get it.
Most positions at AI companies hiring in London offer salaries well over £100,000, and these increase significantly for roles that are more directly technical or require more experience.
AI salaries in London
We took a look at the open positions at major AI companies in London, and where salary ranges were advertised, we have ranked them below.
Anthropic
Many positions were listed on Anthropic’s website, from research and software engineers to legal counsel and marketing roles.
Anthropic noted that for sales roles, the salary range specified is inclusive of incentives for employees meeting specified sales targets.
The company also offers a paid fellowship programme for academics, incentivising them to contribute research to the company and publish papers based on their work.
| Position | Salary Range |
|---|---|
| Research Engineer, Machine Learning (Reinforcement Learning) | £260,000 – £630,000 |
| Research Engineer, Machine Learning (RL Velocity) | £370,000 – £630,000 |
| Research Engineer, Pretraining Scaling | £260,000 – £630,000 |
| Research Engineer, Pretraining | £260,000 – £630,000 |
| Research Engineer, Science of Scaling | £260,000 – £630,000 |
| Research Engineer / Scientist, Alignment Science | £260,000 – £370,000 |
| Engineering Manager, Safeguards Data Infrastructure | £325,000 – £390,000 |
| Data Engineer, Safeguards | £170,000 – £220,000 |
| Software Engineer, Safeguards Infrastructure | £255,000 – £325,000 |
| Software Engineer, Safeguards Foundations | £255,000 – £325,000 |
| Senior Software Security Engineer | £240,000 – £325,000 |
| Staff Software Engineer, Node Infra | £325,000 – £485,000 |
| Staff Software Engineer, Inference | £325,000 – £390,000 |
| Staff Software Engineer, AI Reliability Engineering | £325,000 – £390,000 |
| Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Cluster Infrastructure | £325,000 – £485,000 |
| Staff Engineer, Datacenter Server Lifecycle | £325,000 – £390,000 |
| Senior Software Engineer, Inference | £225,000 – £325,000 |
| Applied AI Architect, Industries | £150,000 – £190,000 |
| Applied AI Architect, Startups | £150,000 – £170,000 |
| Policy Counsel, EMEA | £200,000 – £240,000 |
| Commercial Counsel, EMEA | £125,000 – £165,000 |
| Field Marketing Lead, Industries – EMEA | £160,000 – £200,000 |
| EMEA AE Lead, Beneficial Deployments | £280,000 – £330,000 |
| Applied AI Engineer | £225,000 – £240,000 |
| Head of International Applied AI Architecture, Partnerships | £170,000 – £215,000 |
| Manager, Customer Success | £165,000 – £195,000 |
OpenAI
OpenAI has many positions advertised for roles in its London office, but most of these are listed without a salary range.
The only positions that list salaries are those that are hiring in London and the United States, and these list pay denominated in US dollars. Most positions also offer equity in the company.
For the purpose of this comparison, we have converted these to GBP amounts using the exchange rate at the time of writing and rounded them to the nearest £1,000.
| Position | Salary Range |
|---|---|
| Applied AI Engineer, Codex Core Agent | £171,000 – £286,000 |
| Design Verification, Forward Deployed Engineering | £120,000 – £225,000 |
| Frontend Software Engineer, Codex App | £171,000 – £286,000 |
| Software Engineer, Codex Core Agents | £171,000 – £286,000 |
| Software Engineer, Codex App | £171,000 – £286,000 |
| Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure | £171,000 – £301,000 |
The future of AI work in London
DeepMind, xAI, and Meta all offer numerous AI-related jobs in London, from marketing to security research, but none of them advertises the salaries associated with these positions.
Many of these companies are also offering internship programmes for school leavers and recent graduates in an attempt to cultivate and harness new AI talent and get a jump on their competitors.
With the AI sector becoming an increasingly big portion of the global market, soaking in enormous amounts of capital and speculative funding, it is a great time to have the skills required for these lucrative jobs.
AI engineers in London have their pick of employer, and they enjoy high salaries with the option of equity in these growing companies.
However, machine learning trainers and engineers may too eventually fall prey to the much-predicted AI jobs apocalypse, with some predicting that when AI becomes capable of training and safeguarding itself, companies may be incentivised to replace even high-level engineers with AI agents configured to do their jobs more efficiently.
Looking at the pay offered by the two major AI companies operating in London today, however, it is definitely good work while you can get it.
