PI here (Research Professor of AI, former industry R&D director, so I have seen both sides). The money will never be the same in academia, and rewards are outside of the control of the PI in most cases (e.g. in Germany, it's a government-level decision and everyone is paid the same), so there are two options: work with average people or find smart & idealistic ones. So...

...please excuse this shameless plug: I'm interested in people who would like to work with me to build research software (both on-premise and AWS cloud) using best practices, in particular using Rust. If you are interesteed in machine learning, natural language processing and information retrieval and would like to work with me as a research software engineer, please do get in touch (leidner at acm dot org). Our new 2 TB RAM dev research group server running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is waiting for you (CPU/GPU cluster ressources also available) to set up (a VM for) your CI infrastructure. Your software will be used to push forward the frontier of research in machine learning and its applications to language (summarization, question answering) and information retrieval (vertical search engines, learning to rank, unsupervised topic modeling).

Edit: academia can be poorly funded and bureaucratic. The former can be fixed by grant applications, the latter must be tolerated until politicians/activists fix it.