Skills › genai
Fine-tuning jobs: demand and pay (October 2026)
1,378 open data & AI postings at 720 companies mention Fine-tuning, or 10.5% of all data & AI postings we track (as of October 18, 2026).
10.5%share of data & AI postings
720companies hiring
$228Kmedian pay, US (n=463)
—week over week (needs more history)
Fine-tuning pay by level
| Level (from title) | Median pay | Postings with pay (n) |
|---|---|---|
| Entry / junior | — | 2 |
| Mid (II) | — | 9 |
| Senior | $210K | 106 |
| Staff / lead | $260K | 113 |
| Principal | $259K | 29 |
| Manager | — | 7 |
| Director+ | $270K | 11 |
| Level not stated | $205K | 186 |
Median of the published range midpoint, US postings in USD, annualized. Shown only when n ≥ 10; “—” means fewer.
Roles that ask for Fine-tuning
| Role | Postings | % of that role |
|---|---|---|
| AI Engineer | 526 | 13.9% |
| Machine Learning Engineer | 454 | 23.0% |
| AI Research Scientist | 144 | 33.0% |
| Data Scientist | 94 | 6.1% |
| Data & AI leadership | 51 | 4.8% |
| Data Engineer | 42 | 2.4% |
| Data Architect | 42 | 10.6% |
| Database Engineer / DBA | 16 | 5.3% |
| Data Analyst | 5 | 0.4% |
| Analytics Engineer | 2 | 0.5% |
| Data Governance & Quality | 1 | 0.5% |
| BI Developer / Analyst | 1 | 0.7% |
The weekly Data Skills Index
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How it's measured: a posting counts if its title or description matches the Fine-tuning patterns in our taxonomy. Postings by the vendor itself are excluded. See the methodology.