As of November 8, 2026, Level lists 494 live research scientist roles, and 356 of them (72%) are rated Builds AI, our top level. Amazon, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic post the most. The news behind the question is the end of Microsoft Research's AI Frontiers group, described this week by one of its founders.
What happened
On November 6, 2026, John Langford published The End of AI Frontiers on his blog. He wrote that the group was formed within Microsoft Research after the ChatGPT release, and that it had about 50 people.
In early September, the group was reorganized into Microsoft AI. Langford describes the philosophy of the former Inflection leadership there as scaling, and "aggressively not research". He left Microsoft AI and chose not to return to Microsoft Research. He writes that every other founding leadership team member seems to have come to a similar conclusion, and that the group was reorganized without consent.
He also writes that there will not be internships with the folks there in the coming year.
This article reports what the post says. It does not speculate about where any named person goes next.
Which employers hire research scientists right now?
Level counts 494 live roles with "research scientist" in the search. Amazon has 88 of them, NVIDIA has 41, OpenAI has 31 and Anthropic has 23. Data as of November 8, 2026.
Level has no live Microsoft listing on that date. The Microsoft side of the story therefore does not show up in these counts.
If you want to start from the labs, the pages for OpenAI, Anthropic and NVIDIA list every open role with its level.
How AI-heavy are these research roles?
Of the 494 roles, 356 (72%) are rated Builds AI, which means AI is the product or the research itself. Another 23 are Works on AI and 4 are Uses AI.
The remaining 111 roles (22%) are rated Little AI. Philips, Pfizer, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson and Roche account for 40 of them. Amazon and Anthropic have 9 each.
Level 4 holds 356 of the 494 roles. The definitions of all four levels are on the levels page.
Are research scientist roles remote?
Mostly not. As of November 8, 2026, 383 of the 494 roles (78%) are not remote, and 111 (22%) are remote. Of all roles, 326 are in the United States.
Outside the US, the United Kingdom has 34 roles, India 23, Singapore 15 and Germany 15. If location is your constraint, the remote AI jobs page lists remote roles only.
What do research scientist roles pay?
Among the 289 roles with a yearly salary in US dollars, the median of the midpoint of the posted range is $224,000. This is the posted range, not what offers close at.
For a deeper breakdown by employer and seniority, read research scientist salary. If your interest is safety work, AI interpretability jobs covers who hires there.
How senior do you need to be?
Senior is the largest group. As of November 8, 2026, 271 of the 494 roles (55%) are tagged senior, and 39 are lead. Mid-level roles number 50, and junior roles number 5, so 55 (11%) are open to early-career researchers. 98 roles carry no seniority tag, and 4 are executive.
Level also tags 27 of these roles as internships. Langford writes that there will not be internships with the folks at AI Frontiers. Among Builds AI roles alone, 19 are internships.
For the Builds AI roles with a yearly salary in US dollars, the median midpoint is $238,000. That sample has 206 roles.
Which tools do these postings name?
Python appears in 169 of the 494 roles, and PyTorch in 160. TensorFlow appears in 66 roles, JAX in 29 and scikit-learn in 22. A listing can name several tools, so these counts overlap.
Of the 160 roles naming PyTorch, 158 are Builds AI. Of the 66 naming TensorFlow, 64 are Builds AI, and all 22 naming scikit-learn are too.
