What do machine learning engineers do?

Machine learning engineers train, evaluate, and ship models to production, which shows in their tooling: 2,547 live postings name PyTorch and 0 TensorFlow, against 0 for ChatGPT. 634 live jobs carry the machine learning engineer title, out of 140,131 AI-related postings. Measured October 2026.

How this number is measured

Every figure above is computed from the live postings on Level at the time of measurement, October 2026. Each posting is read for how much of the daily work is AI, then rated from Little AI to Builds AI. Salaries use the posting's own range, in US dollars only. Numbers are recomputed monthly and the page is updated when they move by more than 10 percent.

The live figures on this page count postings whose title contains “machine learning engineer” or “ML engineer”. They were read from the database on October 2026 and are refreshed every ten minutes. A posting that describes the work under another title is not counted. Pay figures appear only above ten postings, with hourly rates and annual salaries kept apart. These counts describe postings, not the companies behind them.

The numbers behind this answer (October 24, 2026)

Machine learning engineer postings

Live postings: 652
Remote: 235 (36.0%)
Little AI or uses AI: 30 (4.6%)
Builds or works on AI: 622 (95.4%)

Most requested skills: machine learning (433), mlops (165), fine tuning (135), MLOps (122), NLP (99)

Most named tools: PyTorch (403), Python (348), TensorFlow (261), scikit-learn (104), JAX (75)

Top employers: Waymo (44), Capital One (31), Faculty (25), Pinterest (22), Amazon (20)

Pay: machine learning engineer postings

Pay type	Median	Range	Postings
Annual salary	$238k	$198k to $276k (p25 to p75)	270

Measured on October 24, 2026. Method: live machine learning engineer postings that publish a pay range, using the midpoint of each range and the most common currency, with no conversion. Hourly rates and annual salaries are counted separately; amounts whose period is unclear are excluded. No figure is shown below 10 postings. How we measure.