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AI & Data recruitment.

Every company is suddenly “an AI company”, which makes real machine-learning and data talent the most contested hiring market of 2026. The candidates who can take models to production, not just fine-tune a demo, are outnumbered by the roles chasing them, and compensation reflects it.

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What ai & data pays in 2026

Indicative London base salaries at startups and scale-ups. Ranges are real. Where a role lands within them depends on your funding stage, how the business is doing and how urgently you’re hiring.

Mid ML / Data Engineer £60k–£90k
Senior ML Engineer £90k–£125k
Senior Data Engineer £85k–£120k
Staff ML / Data Engineer £125k–£155k
AI Product Manager £85k–£120k

What moves offers here

  • Production LLM experience (retrieval, evals, cost/latency engineering) is 2026’s single most-requested skill.
  • MLOps, getting and keeping models in production, pays more than modelling alone.
  • Strong data engineering underneath (pipelines, quality, governance) is what separates AI teams that ship from ones that demo.
  • Candidates weigh compute, data access and publication freedom alongside salary. The offer is more than the number.

Berlin and Amsterdam run in euros at broadly similar levels; New York is higher in dollars. See the city salary guides for local tables.

Roles we cover: DataEngineeringProduct
Hiring in: LondonBerlinAmsterdamNew York