IT salary guides, technology compensation benchmarks, and pay trend analysis — helping employers set competitive offers and helping IT professionals understand their market value across roles, experience levels, and US metro areas.
By Gregg Flecke, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner, KORE1 A generative AI engineer in the U.S. earns roughly $105,000 to $255,000 in base pay in 2026, with lead, multimodal, and model-training specialists clearing $300,000 base and total comp at frontier labs running well past $600,000. That spread is wide on purpose. One title is doing the … Read more
By Gregg Flecke, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner, KORE1 A BI developer in the U.S. earns roughly $95,000 to $165,000 in base pay in 2026, with most mid-to-senior hires landing between $110,000 and $150,000 and lead or architect-level developers clearing $180,000. That range looks sloppy until you know what it’s really measuring. The title covers two … Read more
By Gregg Flecke, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner, KORE1 An LLM engineer in the U.S. earns $150,000 to $265,000 in base pay in 2026 for most mid-to-senior roles, with lead and staff specialists clearing $300,000 base and total comp at frontier AI labs running past $700,000. That is a huge spread, and it is not careless … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A Databricks engineer in the U.S. earns $122,000 to $185,000 in base pay in 2026 for most mid-to-senior roles, with lead and staff specialists clearing $200,000 and total comp at equity-paying employers running well past $250,000. That band is wider than it looks, and the reason is … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 In 2026, U.S. Python developers earn a median base near $133,000, with most offers landing between $95,000 and $165,000, and senior backend or machine-learning specialists clearing $170,000 to $200,000 in total pay. That is a wide band for one job title, and the width is the whole … Read more
By Gregg Flecke Hiring a data scientist in 2026 costs a US employer roughly $190,000 to $370,000 in the first year, once you stack fully loaded pay, recruiting fees, the cost of the open seat, and onboarding. Base salary is the line everyone approves. It is rarely more than 55 to 60 percent of the … Read more
By Gregg Flecke, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner at KORE1 Staff software engineers in the United States earn $195,000 to $265,000 base in 2026 at most employers, and up to $320,000 at Big Tech and the AI labs, with total compensation reaching $700,000 or more. That spread is not noise. It is one title doing very … Read more
By Mike Carter Principal software engineers in the United States earn $200,000 to $300,000 base in 2026, with total compensation ranging from about $235,000 at mid-market employers to roughly $630,000 at Amazon and past $1 million at Meta and Google. No other title on the engineering ladder spreads that wide. The word “principal” sits on … Read more
Pricing the rest of the product ladder? The rung below this seat is in our group product manager salary guide, and the seat above it is the VP product salary guide for 2026. This page is about the director number, and why the hiring manager and finance keep walking in with two of them. Director … Read more
The phrase “data architect” sits on a job board next to three other titles that pay nothing like it. Before you put a number on a req, here is what the role actually earns in 2026, and why the public salary sites will hand you a figure that is off by forty grand in either … Read more
