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Machine Learning Developer Salary and Equity Compensation in Startups 2026

Machine Learning Developer Salary and Equity in 2026

How much can a Machine Learning developer expect to make at US-based startups? The average estimated salary for Machine Learning developers is 132k per year, with a range from 65k to 225k. The salary range for Machine Learning developers varies depending on factors such as location, industry, experience, and startup stage.

132.3k

Average Salary

3 years

Average years of experience

Salary

The average salary for a Machine Learning developer is$132,292, which is 2.6% higher than the average startup salary of$129,000. Machine Learning developer salaries are based on exclusive Wellfound data. All data is updated on a weekly basis. Factors that may influence salary include: location, years of experience, title, size of company, and industry.

Top of market

$207,833/yr

Range $185k - $225k

Average

$132,292/yr

Range $115k - $140k

Below Average

$84,292/yr

Range $65k - $120k

Top Locations

The highest average salary a Machine Learning developer can get in New York, that is $160,000. This pay is 20.9% higher than the average Machine Learning salary in startups, which is $132,292. Salaries will vary based on your location. The top-paying markets in the US, on average, are currently: New York (avg $160,000 per year), Seattle (avg $150,000 per year), Boston (avg $145,000 per year). Remote jobs often pay based on the location you reside in.

New York

$160k

Seattle

$150k

Boston

$145k

Melbourne

$140k

Austin

$135k

San Francisco Bay Area

$135k

Industries

The highest average salary a Machine Learning developer can get in Electric Vehicles, that is $358,500. This pay is 21.5% higher than the average Machine Learning salary, which is $295,150. The highest-paying industries in 2023 are: Electric Vehicles (avg $358,500 per year), Services (avg $358,500 per year), Capital Raising (avg $300,000 per year).

Tech Stack

Top Tech Stacks

The top-paying developer skills of 2026 are:

1. Celery
$202k
2. Clojure
$195k
3. OpenCV
$192k
4. Clojurescript
$187.5k
5. rundeck
$176.5k
6. Scipy
$175k
7. Symfony
$175k
8. react
$175k
9. RESTful APIs
$174k
10. Vue
$170k

Years of experience

Below Average

Average

Top of Market

The highest average salary a Machine Learning developer can get with 10+ years of experience, that is $60,000. This pay is 53.5% lower than the average salary in startups, which is $129,000. The salary range varies with years of experience and depends on other factors such as skill set, size of company, and industry.

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Popular skills

Python PHP C++Java Javascript .NET jQuery Haskell Machine Learning Budgeting SQL C#Django MySQL Android Codeigniter MongoDB Node.js Ruby SOLR Groovy Drupal MAGENTO Redis R PostgreSQL C Assembly Perl Svn Matlab Cassandra Prospecting Puppet Unity3D Clojure Nginx Qt Hibernate Sybase Visual Basic Scala Adobe Photoshop Symfony SQLAlchemy Rabbitmq WebGL Heroku Spring Amazon S3 Celery Lisp SAS Neo4J OpenCV Verilog Amazon SQS Selenium Lua Mongoose Adobe InDesign Gradle SQLite Zookeeper Flask Hbase Unreal D3.js Numpy Scipy Xcode Autocad Apache Tomcat Dart Nagios Ember.js Backbone DynamoDB Ruby on Rails Azure Bootstrap Splunk Websockets Pandas Kafka Fortran Express.js Laravel WebRTC TypeScript Ansys Unity Sketch Spark Objective-C scikit-learn Elixir Deep Learning Docker LTE Firebase Microsoft Visio rundeck Rust Clojurescript Sequelize Xamarin Kotlin Digital Ocean Amazon Kinesis Swift ElasticSearch Solidity AWS react Invision Ionic Postman Kubernetes React Native Zeplin Framer RESTful APIs GraphQL Pyspark Vue Keras Principle Prometheus Jupyter Electron Go WebAssembly Airflow Amazon ECS GCP Web3.Js PyTorch Nuxt.Js openAI Flutter Nest.Js SwiftUI Svelte

Tech Hubs for Machine Learning

Austin Boston Chicago Denver Los Angeles San Diego Seattle London Vancouver Toronto New York Sydney Cambridge San Francisco Bay Area Remote

Machine Learning Developer Salary and Equity in 2026

$207,833/yr

$132,292/yr

$84,292/yr

New York

Seattle

Boston

Melbourne

Austin

San Francisco Bay Area

Santa Monica

Remote

Vancouver

Sydney

Denver

Minneapolis

Chicago

San Diego

Top Tech Stacks

1. Celery

2. Clojure

3. OpenCV

4. Clojurescript

5. rundeck

6. Scipy

7. Symfony

8. react

9. RESTful APIs

10. Vue

Popular roles

Popular skills

Tech Hubs for Machine Learning

Industries for Machine Learning