AI engineer jobs in San Francisco
SF is the densest AI hiring market on Earth. Most roles are hybrid (3 days on-site) at OpenAI, Anthropic, Adept, Mistral US, and the long tail of AI-native startups.
About these roles
SF's AI hiring market splits cleanly into foundation-model labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, the Inflection diaspora) and the applied-AI tier (every YC startup shipping LLM features plus the Series B-D wave of AI-native products). The lab roles are research-leaning, expect PhD or strong publication track record, base $250-400k with serious equity. The applied roles are systems-leaning, expect strong backend background + production LLM / RAG / vector DB experience, base $200-310k with more variable equity. SF roles are almost universally hybrid (3 days in-office), with most labs preferring 4-5 days. The AI cluster is concentrated around Hayes Valley and South Park; commute and rent factor heavily into compensation negotiations here.
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