Executive summary
68% of 4,931 location-classified AI/ML engineering roles are in the US — but European AI salaries run within 3% of US median ($235,235 vs $233,153 average for disclosed postings). 48% of the whole index is concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area alone (2,377 roles across 245 companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Scale AI, Applied Intuition, Waymo). Remote-friendly postings are 12% of the market. Geography is destiny for AI supply; for salary it's less so.
The top cities
Across the 4,931 location-classified AI/ML engineering postings, the top 15 metros look like this. Role count, distinct company count, and average disclosed salary for each.
| Metro | Region | Roles | Share | Companies | Avg salary | Salary n |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco Bay Area | US-West | 2,377 | 48.2% | 245 | $243,352 | 1,590 |
| New York | US-East | 491 | 10.0% | 118 | $225,876 | 341 |
| Remote (US) | Remote | 377 | 7.6% | 90 | $212,571 | 302 |
| London | Europe | 276 | 5.6% | 65 | $235,577 | 16 |
| Remote (Global) | Remote | 233 | 4.7% | 83 | $198,380 | 120 |
| Bangalore | APAC | 155 | 3.1% | 41 | $225,000 | 2 |
| Boston | US-East | 153 | 3.1% | 21 | $201,328 | 127 |
| Seattle | US-West | 118 | 2.4% | 29 | $190,913 | 99 |
| Toronto | Canada | 104 | 2.1% | 24 | $207,256 | 39 |
| Austin | US-South | 92 | 1.9% | 17 | $194,300 | 53 |
| Paris | Europe | 80 | 1.6% | 15 | $265,000 | 1 |
| Singapore | APAC | 78 | 1.6% | 21 | — | 0 |
| Amsterdam | Europe | 60 | 1.2% | 10 | — | 0 |
| Munich | Europe | 47 | 1.0% | 11 | — | 0 |
| Washington DC | US-East | 39 | 0.8% | 16 | $232,346 | 29 |
Regional distribution
Rolled up to regions, the US-plus-remote skew is stark.
The Bay Area + NYC together are a majority of the entire classified US market. This is more concentrated than general-software hiring, not less — the AI frontier has reversed the post-pandemic remote-first distribution and pulled top talent back into two metros.
The SF / Bay Area hub
The San Francisco Bay Area alone accounts for 48% of the classified market — 2,377 AI/ML roles across 245 companies. Average disclosed salary there: $243,352. NYC is a distant second at 10% (491 roles, $225,876). Every other US metro sits in single digits. This is more concentrated than the general-software geography, not less — despite ten years of "everyone going remote," the AI frontier is more location-bound today than it was pre-pandemic.
Europe vs US salary gap
The European AI market is small but high-quality: 11% of the classified index (545 roles). Average disclosed salary $235,235 vs $233,153 for US — a gap of +0.9%. The standard narrative ("European tech pays 40-60% below US") under-reads what the AI subsegment pays specifically: frontier labs pay close to parity to win ML talent, and the top band in London / Zurich / Dublin is not meaningfully lower than top-band NYC for equivalent roles. The gap widens in the mid-market, not at the top.
Remote-vs-city mix
Advertised remote AI/ML roles sit at 12% of the geographically-classified sample (610 of 4,931). Average salary for those remote postings: $208,536. This is consistent with the broader pattern in our workplace analysis: remote is structural but not dominant — AI/ML engineering has stayed more onsite-heavy than general software, because GPU access, data-residency requirements, and in-person research-team density still matter.
Why the concentration exists
Three forces keep AI hiring geographically sticky. Compute + data gravity. Training pipelines need proximity to high-bandwidth interconnects and the hyperscaler regions (us-east-1, us-west-2). Research density. Frontier labs benefit from overlapping talent networks — Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale AI, Meta FAIR, Google Brain successor groups are all within 10 miles of each other in the Bay. Visa + immigration leverage. H-1B lottery odds, O-1 timelines, and Green Card backlogs favor employees already onshore — so US roles stay US-staffed and employers prefer to concentrate senior AI headcount in the Bay rather than distribute globally.
Signal for job seekers and hiring managers
If you're looking for AI roles. The math is stark: SF Bay alone has more open roles than all of Europe and Canada combined this crawl. If relocating is viable, it is the single highest-leverage move for AI career access. If it is not, the next best paths are (1) a remote-first AI-first company (Anthropic, OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Scale all post some remote roles), (2) London or Zurich for European candidates (pay is close to parity at the frontier-lab level), or (3) a non-AI-first company with an AI team (Stripe, Shopify, Airbnb, Discord all post remote AI work but compete with fewer specialized applicants). If you're hiring. Post in the Bay if you can afford it and your product needs frontier talent; post remote if you're earlier-stage or budget-constrained — the remote applicant pool is larger and less contested.
Methodology
Generated by paginating the live aidevboard.com/api/v1/jobs endpoint (public, unauthenticated) and bucketing each job's location field by substring match against 28 curated city/region patterns. Total jobs pulled this cycle: 6,450 — of those 4,931 matched a city/region bucket; 1,519 did not (rare employer-specific location strings). Location strings are employer-advertised free text, not filtered for permanent residency, visa status, or actual work eligibility — a job tagged "San Francisco, CA" may or may not also accept remote candidates. The /api/v1/stats endpoint does not currently expose a locations array; this paper reconstructs it from per-job data. Salary averages are midpoints of disclosed salary_min / salary_max bands, restricted to the subset of jobs in each city with a disclosure — sample sizes are noted in the "Salary n" column. This page auto-regenerates weekly (Mon 9:30 am PT).
Download raw data: The per-city + per-region dataset is mirrored as a public gist — CSV · Markdown · view on GitHub. Auto-updated every weekly regeneration; canonical raw URLs are stable across revisions.
What's next
For the top-line AI hiring landscape, see Q2 2026 AI Engineering Hiring Snapshot. For compensation across skill tags, see Q2 2026 AI Compensation by Skill. For the workplace-pay angle (remote vs onsite vs hybrid), see Q2 2026 Remote vs Onsite AI Hiring. For the entry-level pipeline specifically, see Q2 2026 The Junior AI Hiring Gap. Full reading paths at the Research Atlas.