AI engineering salaries in the US range from $115K–$150K base at junior level (up to $173K total comp) to $200K–$312K base at senior level (often $400K+ total comp). Mid-level engineers with 3–5 years of hands-on ML experience are seeing the steepest 9% YoY salary growth due to high demand and limited supply. Top-tier companies like OpenAI and Google can push total compensation well past $600K–$900K for experienced engineers. Key salary drivers include specialization in LLMs, RAG architecture, MLOps, and cloud platforms, as well as location (SF Bay Area, NYC, Seattle pay most) and company stage (frontier AI labs > FAANG > late-stage startups > enterprises). The post emphasizes that AI engineering is distinct from ML engineering — it's about deploying and integrating models into production systems, requiring strong backend software skills alongside AI knowledge.