Salaries

Industry vertical.

AI Security Roles.

Where AI meets adversaries.

26
$125K
$73K to $347K

Source.

By Justin Bartak, Founder & Chief AI OfficerUpdated Q2 2024 benchmarks

Adversaries are getting better at breaking AI systems faster than most teams can defend them. Red teamers, threat modelers, content safety engineers, AI penetration testers, cybersecurity engineers fluent in ML pipelines. Two scarce specialties stacked. Compensation runs above general AI engineering and above general cybersecurity, because the candidate pool is the intersection of both. Roles below are sorted by base salary.

Roles in ai security roles.

AI Security Roles ranked by base median salary, sourced from Orbyt Intelligence Q2 2024.
RoleLowMedianHigh
AI Safety Director$227K$267K$347K
Staff AI Safety Engineer$194K$227K$277K
Principal AI Safety Engineer$194K$227K$277K
AI Red Team Lead$170K$199K$242K
Senior AI Safety Engineer$156K$181K$211K
AI Safety Researcher$97K$141K$187K
AI Safety Engineer$99K$133K$174K
AI Content Safety Engineer$99K$133K$174K
AI Safety Monitoring Engineer$99K$133K$174K
Generative AI Safety Engineer$99K$133K$174K
AI Security & Red Teaming Specialist$87K$125K$165K
AI Red Teamer$87K$125K$165K
AI Threat Modeler$87K$125K$165K
AI Penetration Tester$87K$125K$165K
Model Vulnerability Analyst$87K$125K$165K
AI Cybersecurity Specialist$87K$125K$165K
AI Cybersecurity Analyst$87K$125K$165K
Red Team AI Engineer$87K$125K$165K
AI Security Engineer$87K$125K$165K
AI Threat Detection Engineer$87K$125K$165K
AI Security Operations Specialist$87K$125K$165K
AI Agent Security Engineer$87K$125K$165K
AI Bias Auditor$78K$113K$162K
AI Food Safety Analyst$78K$113K$162K
Junior AI Safety Engineer$84K$103K$123K
AI Safety Program Manager$73K$101K$136K

Top cities.

Common questions.

Traditional pen testing finds bugs in software. AI red teaming finds failure modes in models: prompt injections, jailbreaks, training data extraction, model inversion, content safety bypasses. The skill overlap is meaningful but not identical, and hiring managers want both.

Both, but mostly attacks. The threat landscape changed faster than regulation can catch up. Real exploits in production systems drove most of the 2025 to 2026 hiring. Regulation will accelerate hiring further as it lands.

Most hires have CS or related, but the highest-paid people in AI security came in through cybersecurity (OSCP, OSEP, CISSP) and learned ML on the job. Adversarial mindset matters more than ML academic credentials.

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