Research Scientist salary

The median research scientist posting at a tech startup offers $240K base, with the middle half between $195K and $310K — from 192 live pay ranges at 55 companies.

Median base

$240K

midpoint of posted ranges

Middle 50%

$195K–$310K

25th–75th percentile

Typical range

$198K–$288K

median low & high end

Data

192 postings

55 companies

By seniority

Level	Postings	Median	Middle 50%
Level not stated	114	$242K	$195K–$315K
Senior	49	$214K	$183K–$251K
Staff+	27	$293K	$238K–$326K

By US city

City	Postings	Median	Middle 50%
San Francisco	93	$293K	$240K–$350K
New York	34	$243K	$219K–$291K
Boston	13	$165K	$109K–$200K
Seattle	11	$220K	$214K–$336K
Mountain View	10	$238K	$233K–$274K
Sunnyvale	9	$275K	$275K–$366K
Somerville	8	$109K	$107K–$150K

Top-paying companies

Company	Postings	Median	Middle 50%
OpenAI	21	$440K	$398K–$440K
Wayve	3	$366K	$366K–$404K
Mercor	2	$363K	$356K–$369K
Anthropic	11	$333K	$310K–$399K
Databricks	2	$310K	$308K–$313K
Pika	2	$293K	$293K–$293K
Plaid	2	$290K	$281K–$299K
Snorkel AI	4	$288K	$276K–$295K
Applied Intuition	5	$275K	$275K–$275K
Cartesia	4	$270K	$265K–$278K
Garner Health	4	$268K	$205K–$327K
Faire	13	$251K	$251K–$251K
Scale AI	8	$243K	$229K–$264K
Baseten	2	$243K	$240K–$245K
Lila Sciences	22	$240K	$162K–$308K

Highest posted ranges right now

Research Scientist, Interpretability Anthropic	$350K–$850K
Staff+ Research Scientist, Multi-Agent Anthropic	$500K–$850K
Researcher, Training OpenAI	$300K–$600K
Senior Research Scientist, Model Evaluation Cohere	$250K–$535K
Research Scientist, Robot Foundation Models Wayve	$370K–$513K
Researcher, Safety Training OpenAI	$380K–$500K
Researcher, Alignment OpenAI	$295K–$500K
Researcher, Safety Oversight OpenAI	$380K–$500K

Figures are the midpoint of each pay range published in a job posting (US$, base salary as posted), across open roles at the startups we track, recalculated daily. Postings without a range, interns and contractors are excluded. Updated Oct 27, 2026.