Research Engineer job title trend since Apr 2011
Research · Rising · in 1.8% of HN hiring posts · 115 open roles at 29 companies · median $353k · first seen Apr 2011
Who is hiring for it
Open postings on their own job boards, read 22h ago12 of 29 companies (top 12 shown)
| # | Company | Open roles | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Anthropic | 33 | |
| 2 |  OpenAI | 14 | |
| 3 |  Elastic | 7 | |
| 4 |  Decagon | 6 | |
| 5 |  Synthesia | 5 | |
| 6 |  Together AI | 5 | |
| 7 |  Turing | 5 | |
| 8 |  ElevenLabs | 4 | |
| 9 |  Mercor | 4 | |
| 10 |  Thinking Machines Lab | 4 | |
| 11 |  Character.AI | 3 | |
| 12 |  Cognition | 3 |
Open roles
8 of 115; company pages list the rest| Role | |||
|---|---|---|---|
Senior/Staff System Research Engineer - LLM Inference Optimization SnowflakeUS-WA-Bellevue$236k to $330k | Snowflake | US-WA-Bellevue | $236k to $330k |
| Research Engineer - Environments, Data and Post-TrainingMercorSan Francisco$250k to $500k | Mercor | San Francisco | $250k to $500k |
Applied AI Research Engineer StarburstUnited States$215k to $270k | Starburst | United States | $215k to $270k |
| Research Engineer, AI for Chip DesignOpenAISan Francisco$380k to $500k | OpenAI | San Francisco | $380k to $500k |
| Research Engineer, Takeoff IntelAnthropicRemote-Friendly (Travel Required) | San Francisco, CA$350k to $850k | Anthropic | Remote-Friendly (Travel Required) | San Francisco, CA | $350k to $850k |
| Research Engineer, SafetyDecagonSan Francisco$200k to $400k | Decagon | San Francisco | $200k to $400k |
| Senior Security Research Engineer, SONAR (Security Operations and Novel Adversary Research)ElasticUnited States$133k to $211k | Elastic | United States | $133k to $211k |
Research Engineer, Model Evaluation and Improvement BenchlingSan Francisco, CA$136k to $265k | Benchling | San Francisco, CA | $136k to $265k |
Share of Hacker News hiring posts
444 posts since Apr 2011 · +103% in 6 monthsSeptember 2026 6 of 256 postings, 2.3%
Related titles
About this title
Writes the code that makes research run: training runs, experiments, infrastructure.
Also counted: RE
First sighting
...India - Front end designer, Deployment architect, NLP research engineer. http://iapps.in/jobs
Median posted salary $353k from 73 postings that state a base pay range (the median of their midpoints, USD a year). Not a survey of what people earn.
Sources: Hacker News Who is hiring threads and about 130 public job boards, read weekly. A title's share is not the job market's size. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.