Staff AI and Machine Learning Engineer Jobs (2026)

This hub keeps only listings the board classifies as staff or principal, the band that usually asks for eight or more years of experience and includes distinguished engineer and senior principal titles. About 1,600 such listings are live as of September 2026, roughly one in eight of the whole board, and around 170 were posted in the last week. Half are tagged remote.

Waymo and SentinelLabs are the largest posters with about 55 and 53 listings, and Coupang, Anduril, Zscaler, OKX and Databricks each have 20 to 30. Recent titles show the range: staff computer vision engineer for localization, principal machine learning engineer for embodied AI and game characters, distinguished machine learning engineer for safety, and staff firmware engineer for edge ML. Machine learning engineer is the largest category at about 550, then data engineer at roughly 150, MLOps and ML infrastructure at 100 and robotics at about 65.

The US names about 700 of the listings. The UK has about 120, Canada about 60, India about 55 and Singapore about 30. About 22 percent of listings state a USD salary, and among those the median midpoint is about $240,000 a year; most listings do not publish a figure, and at this level the stated base range is only part of what an offer tends to contain.

When searching, treat the title as a signal rather than a rule: some employers use senior for what others call staff, so the senior AI jobs hub is worth scanning too. Combine this page with the category filter to isolate staff data engineering or staff MLOps, and with the minimum salary filter when pay is stated. The $200K plus and $250K plus hubs overlap heavily with this one.