Raleigh · Durham · Cary · Chapel Hill · AI, ML and LLM engineers
Price AI Staffing in Raleigh on Both of the Triangle’s Wage Tables
Federal wage data splits the Triangle into two metros, and the Durham side pays computer and math work $22,260 more at the median. Your finalists can drive to either one. We price every Raleigh AI offer against both tables before it goes out.
computer and math · median annual pay
gap +$22,260 on the durham side
AI staffing in Raleigh means recruiting machine learning, LLM and applied AI engineers for employers in Raleigh, Cary, Durham and Research Triangle Park, and KORE1 delivers a qualified shortlist in 17 days. Contract, contract-to-hire and direct hire searches run on both sides of the Wake and Durham county line, through the AI desk of our IT staffing services practice. A year after they start, 92 of every 100 people KORE1 places are still there.
Last updated: October 10, 2026
$22,260
More at the median for computer and math work in the Durham-Chapel Hill metro than in Raleigh-Cary, $130,020 against $107,760, in the May 2025 federal wage survey.
7.3%
Of every job in the Durham-Chapel Hill metro is computer and math work. Raleigh-Cary runs 5.9%, and the national figure is 3.4%. Both sit well above it.
44%
Of the Triangle’s 22,370 software developer jobs are counted on the Durham side, 9,790 of them, in a metro with less than half of Raleigh-Cary’s total employment. Small metro, big share.
17days
From our intake call to a Raleigh AI shortlist we’d put in front of your panel. A year on, 92% of the people hired off those lists haven’t left.
The problem
Why AI Staffing in Raleigh Gets Priced Off the Cheaper Table
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes pay by metro, and it cuts the Triangle in two. Wake County reports as Raleigh-Cary. Durham and Orange counties report as Durham-Chapel Hill, and so does most of Research Triangle Park, since the Research Triangle Foundation puts 78% of the park’s 7,000 acres in Durham County.
So a comp team in North Raleigh or Cary pulls the Raleigh-Cary table, because that’s where the office is. Reasonable. It’s also the lower table for most technical work, and not by a little. Across every occupation the Durham side averages $38.32 an hour against Raleigh-Cary’s $34.01.
Candidates don’t sort themselves by county. Why would they? An engineer renting in Morrisville can reach IBM or Cisco in the park, Duke in Durham, or Red Hat’s tower downtown on the same morning drive, and they’ll quote you a number from whichever of those is paying the most this year.
Your band competes with the higher table, whatever your address says.
Where the work sits
Most of Research Triangle Park Reports on Durham’s Table
The park holds 385-plus companies and more than 55,000 workers by the foundation’s own count, with IBM, Cisco, Fidelity, NetApp and GSK among the big wooded campuses. Durham adds IQVIA’s headquarters and Duke’s research groups. UNC Chapel Hill sits in Orange County, which reports on the same Durham-Chapel Hill table.
It shows in the counts. Computer and math work is 7.3% of all jobs in that metro, more than double the national 3.4%, and it holds 9,790 software developers to Raleigh-Cary’s 12,580 with less than half the workforce.
Raleigh-Cary has real anchors of its own. SAS and Epic Games in Cary, Lenovo’s U.S. headquarters in Morrisville, Red Hat downtown, NC State. Plenty of AI work. It just reports on the other table.
May 2025, both tables
What Each Table Says About the Same Five Jobs
Five annual pay figures from the federal survey, one row per measure. Wake County sits left of the dashed line, Durham and Orange counties to the right. The orange bar is the gap, drawn to one scale, and it points toward whichever side pays more.
| Measure | Raleigh-Carywake county | Durham-Chapel Hilldurham and orange | The gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Computer and math occupations, median | $107,76043,780 jobs | $130,02025,070 jobs | durham +$22,260 |
| Software developers, median | $132,77012,580 jobs | $135,6209,790 jobs | durham +$2,850 |
| Software developers, 90th percentile | $185,110 | $209,410 | durham +$24,300 |
| Computer and information research scientists, median | $128,370280 jobs | $136,99090 jobs | durham +$8,620 |
| Data scientists, median | $120,7101,990 jobs | $106,5001,320 jobs | raleigh +$14,210 |
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics wage survey for May 2025, Raleigh-Cary and Durham-Chapel Hill. Small cells move a lot from one year to the next, and 90 research scientists is a small cell, so read that row for direction rather than dollars. On this page orange marks a gap between the two tables.
The exception
For Data Scientists the Gap Runs the Other Way
One title flips. Raleigh-Cary pays data scientists a $120,710 median, almost exactly the national $120,230, while Durham-Chapel Hill comes in at $106,500. That’s $14,210 lower, on the side that pays more for nearly everything else.
Our read, and it’s a read rather than a finding, is who gets counted. The Durham table carries Duke and UNC, where plenty of people titled data scientist work in research groups and academic medicine on university pay scales that rarely match what a SaaS company in Cary would offer the same person. It also counts 600 statisticians to Raleigh-Cary’s 210, mostly the clinical trial and biostatistics bench around IQVIA and the two medical schools.
That bench is worth a look. A biostatistician with SAS, R and five years of trial modeling is often one production project away from a strong applied ML hire, and many of them are paid off the lower number today. Ask what they shipped. Then decide.
Roles we staff
The AI Roles Raleigh Teams Hire For, and the Table That Prices Each
Most of these seats price off software developer pay, and at the median the two tables sit only $2,850 apart, close enough that a band built in Raleigh usually holds for mid-level hires. It widens at the top. The orange card is the seat where it opens widest.
01
Machine Learning Engineer
Trains, packages and serves models a product team calls in production. PyTorch, a feature store, and whatever cloud the company already pays for.
02
LLM Inference and Applied AI Engineer
Retrieval, evaluation, serving cost. Red Hat’s purchase of a lead vLLM contributor put serious inference work in downtown Raleigh.
03 · where the gap opens
Senior and Staff ML Engineer
Priced near the 90th percentile, where Durham-Chapel Hill runs $24,300 ahead. Budget from that table or plan to lose the last round.
04
MLOps and Model Platform Engineer
Model registry, evaluation runs, GPU scheduling, rollback. Our MLOps engineer staffing desk looks for someone who has been paged about a model.
05
Applied Scientist, Statistics to ML
Trial and outcomes modeling from the IQVIA, Duke and UNC orbit, moving into production ML. Strong on method. Check the Python.
06
Research Scientist, Applied AI
Publishes like an academic, ships like an engineer. Our AI research scientist staffing page covers how we screen the PhD side.
Each of these has its own screening write-up, for machine learning engineers, LLM engineers and generative AI engineers.
How intake works
We Bring Both Tables to the Intake Call
Before anyone talks about candidates, we ask three things. Where the office is, which side of the county line your likely finalists live on, and what they’re paid today. Three questions, ten minutes. Those answers decide which table your band is really up against.
Then we set your band next to both. For a senior ML engineer the Raleigh-Cary 90th percentile for software developers is $185,110 and the Durham-Chapel Hill one is $209,410. Build the band on the first and it misses everyone currently paid on the second, which you’ll discover in the final round. That’s the expensive way.
More base isn’t the only fix. Sometimes it’s two remote days a week for someone driving in from Chapel Hill on I-40, or a sign-on bonus sized to cover the first year’s difference between the table they’re paid on now and yours. We’ll say which during intake week, while it’s cheap to change.
Coverage
Covering AI Staffing in Raleigh, Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill
Raleigh-Cary has more of the jobs, Durham-Chapel Hill pays more for most of them, and candidates cross between the two every morning. We tag each part of the Triangle with the table it reports on and search both sides for every role.
wake · raleigh-cary
Downtown Raleigh and Centennial Campus
Red Hat’s tower, Pendo and the Warehouse District startups, plus NC State’s research campus. Open-source infrastructure, SaaS and a lot of applied LLM work.
wake · raleigh-cary
Cary, Morrisville and Apex
SAS, Epic Games and Lenovo. Analytics software, games and PC hardware, and plenty of senior engineers who live out here and drive whichever way the offer points.
78% durham · durham-chapel hill
Research Triangle Park
IBM, Cisco, Fidelity, NetApp and GSK on wooded campuses that straddle the county line. Enterprise ML, infrastructure and pharma research, mostly reporting on the Durham table.
durham, orange · durham-chapel hill
Downtown Durham and Chapel Hill
IQVIA, Duke and UNC Chapel Hill, plus the startups filling Durham’s old tobacco warehouses. Clinical AI, health data and research engineering.
Outside AI, our Triangle desks cover IT staffing in Raleigh, engineering staffing in Raleigh and the Durham staffing agency side of the region.
Engagement
Contract Rates Follow the Hourly Tables, Which Sit $7.10 Apart
Same recruiters, same candidates. Different math. Hourly work tracks the hourly means, which for computer and math run $54.71 in Raleigh-Cary and $61.81 in Durham-Chapel Hill.
budget approved, headcount frozen
Contract and Contract-to-Hire
We quote the bill rate against both hourly tables, so a contractor who lives in Durham doesn’t leave at the first Raleigh-priced renewal.
Contract Staffing →a permanent seat with a long ramp
Direct Hire
ML leads and senior engineers, priced at the 90th percentile of whichever table your finalists are paid from now.
Direct Hire Staffing →fixed scope, fixed finish
Scoped Project or SOW
Build an evaluation harness before a launch, or run a retrieval pilot to a go or no-go by quarter end. Then it stops.
Project Staffing →Common Questions
What will a Raleigh AI engineer cost us?
Budget between $132,770 and $209,410 for most Raleigh AI hires, the Raleigh-Cary software developer median and the Durham-Chapel Hill 90th percentile in May 2025 federal wage data.
Where a role lands inside that range depends on seniority and on which table your finalists are paid from today. At the senior end the same search can come in $24,300 apart purely on the county line. That’s real money. We size it at intake, before the first declined offer does it for you.
Does salary data count Research Triangle Park as Raleigh or Durham?
Mostly Durham, since the Research Triangle Foundation puts 78% of the park’s land in Durham County, which federal wage data reports as part of the Durham-Chapel Hill metro.
The other 22% sits in Wake County and reports as Raleigh-Cary. So a salary tool that keys off a ZIP code can hand you two different answers for two offices inside the same park. Check which one you used.
Why do data scientists earn less in Durham than in Raleigh?
$14,210 is the gap, with Raleigh-Cary at a $120,710 median and Durham-Chapel Hill at $106,500 in the May 2025 federal data, which is the reverse of most technical titles.
We think it’s mostly who the Durham table counts. Duke and UNC employ a lot of research data scientists on academic pay scales, and they pull the median down. Don’t read it as a discount on industry hires over there. Ask before you assume.
Can a biostatistician or SAS programmer move into a machine learning role?
Often, yes, and Durham-Chapel Hill holds about nine times the national share of statisticians, 600 of them, mostly in clinical trial and academic research work.
The ones who make the jump have usually built something that runs without them. A scoring service, a pipeline, a model somebody else calls. We screen for that plus Python and version control ahead of the modeling questions, which they tend to ace. Most can learn the rest.
How quickly can KORE1 get us Raleigh AI candidates?
17 days, on average, from intake to a qualified shortlist, and 92% of our placements stay past their first anniversary.
LLM and platform searches usually beat that. Senior research hires run longer, because almost everyone worth hiring is employed and wants to meet the team, see the compute budget and hear who they’d report to before they’ll talk numbers. Sometimes much longer. If your band can’t close on either table, you’ll hear it in the first week.
Do AI engineers in the Triangle expect to work remotely?
Most expect at least a hybrid schedule, and here the office address is part of the offer, because a Durham commute and a North Raleigh commute are different jobs to someone living in Apex.
Platform and LLM roles tend to settle at one or two office days a week. Anything touching lab instruments, patient records or a validated clinical trial system usually needs more time on site, since that work tends to live behind a badge reader in Durham or the park. Put the days and the address in the posting. Both.
Do you recruit graduates from NC State, Duke and UNC?
Yes, from all three, and NC State’s Institute for Advanced Analytics has run its ten-month Master of Science in Analytics since 2007, so this region has produced analytics graduates longer than most.
New graduates do best on a team with a senior engineer who has time to review their work. Without one, we’d steer you toward someone three to five years into their career who can work unsupervised, and we’ll say so during intake, not after you’ve paid for a search. More on the NC State program is on its own site.
Bring us the role and the office address. We’ll set your band against both tables.
Give us the seniority, the approved range and where the team sits. You’ll get back who’s realistically reachable at that number on each side of the county line, and which single term in the offer would close the gap fastest. No deck required.
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