The author is a skilled research scientist in a very competitive space with some high-profile publications (e.g. Gumbel Softmax). He is absolutely an outlier, but not a unicorn -- AI researchers with good publications and reputation will attract a lot of interest from companies with lots of money to spend. Low 7-figures for an ~L7 research scientist with competing offers from FAANG research labs is not crazy.

"Staff" is L6 though (at least at Google, afaik).

People are conflating SWE (or "research scientist" in name) bands with research scientist bands at labs like Brain. This guy is an outlier.

"You can only be level X with compensation Y after Z YOE" is one of the greatest infohazards in tech.

Fwiw, the pay bands at Brain are the same as the pay bands everywhere else, with the sole exception of stock grants in initial offers.

That probably matter a lot.

Currently on the job market in the AI space in the Bay Area - 400k to 600k is senior level at FAANG + similar. Low 7 figures at staff wouldn't shock me (although I don't have any actual data on that)

Can we pause and admire a data scientist drawing conclusions while being utterly unconcerned with underlying data? ;)

that's ok, they are bayesian

Pay definitely doesn't increase by 600k+ as you go from senior to staff. Yikes. Are people larping on HN?

ML/AI initial offers can be fairly inflated (https://aipaygrad.es/)

They're paying for a mascot. It's a marketing expense. $1.2 million per year is nothing when one considers the increased ease of hiring young grunts who do the ugly but necessary work, and who do it well because they think that if they pay their dues, they'll be picked to do the upper-caste "interesting" work, which of course they won't.

In those jobs, you don't even have to show up (although most of themdo, in order to stay relevant but also because these ex-academics tend to be very driven people). You're getting paid well for letting the company say you work there, because this makes it easier for the rest of the company to fill out their chain gangs of early-20s Jira jockeys who'll be used for three years and then PIP-raped because "yellow zone".

OP is probably in the best situation to judge this since they likely had competing offers or at the very least know peers with competing offers at FAANG+ staff level.

I'd be interested in a credible source for this as well, even though ML work pays more. From what I know from people in the industry it's 6 not 7 figures.

looking at levels.fyi it seems there are at least several companies paying 7 figures to ML engineers with less than 10 years experience, although majority are at 15+

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Machine-Le...

If you drill down, you'll find out that those 7-figures for positions lower than principle engineer are lopsided towards stocks, and are likely a reflection of luck-of-the-draw stock-appreciation relating to when RSU grants were issued.

600k is a senior engineers wage

No, it's not. If you get lucky with stock market movements, that might be your total annual comp, which is not your wage. I made close to what you're claiming at senior level, at the recent peak of stock market insanity, but I'd stick to the dictionary definition of "wage."

This all day. Sure if you joined FB in March 2020 your total comp today will be a multiple of that 700k, but FB is not giving out 600k packages today to e5s ( and e5 imo is staff+ at many lower tier companies ), more like 450k all in compensation.