For engineers
Which engineering jobs pay $300,000
Which titles, employers and states file engineering base salaries of $300,000 or more, from 231,501 US visa wage filings
In the twelve months to June 2026, 2,567 US visa wage filings for engineering and research titles carried a base salary of $300,000 or more, about 1.1% of the 231,501 filed for those titles. They came from 517 employers, and 76% were in California.
Where the number comes from
Each figure comes from the Labor Condition Applications employers file with the US Department of Labor for a worker on an H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 visa. A filing names the job title, the worksite and the salary the company commits to pay. We count certified, full-time filings with a yearly salary, decided from July 2025 to June 2026, and use the middle of the range where a range is filed. These are the same filings and title rules as the Zelcast Pay Index, where the method is set out in full.
Engineering and research titles here are any title with engineer, engineering, developer, technical staff or programmer in it, plus research, applied, data and machine learning scientists and software, solutions, cloud, data, systems, enterprise, technical and security architects.
Who files the most
The largest filers of $300,000 base salaries were NVIDIA (167), ByteDance (153), Meta (110), OpenAI (95), TikTok (92) and Google (90). The six AI labs account for about 10% of them. They came from 517 employers in all, with Tesla (62), Roblox (57) and Jane Street (33) among the frequent ones.
Which titles reach it
- Member of Technical Staff at the six AI labs. 220 of 418 filings, 53%.
- Member of Technical Staff elsewhere. 132 of 808, 16%.
- Research engineer. 41 of 391, 10%.
- Founding engineer. 18 of 271, 7%.
- Machine learning engineer. 85 of 1,416, 6%.
- Staff software engineer. 35 of 1,762, 2%.
- Software engineer, excluding Google and Meta. 176 of 16,108, about 1%.
Management and senior individual titles are common among the rest: Engineering Manager (72), Principal Software Engineer (50), Director of Software Engineering (28) and Distinguished Engineer (21). Counting Google and Meta, a plain software engineer title reaches $300,000 mostly at Meta, NVIDIA, Google and Jane Street.
Where they are
California had 1,939 of the 2,567 filings, Washington 247 and New York 223. Texas had 46.
What the data can and can’t tell you
These are base salaries only, so they leave out equity, bonuses and benefits. They cover workers on these visas, who are a large share of engineers at many US tech companies but not all of them. A filing states what an employer commits to pay for a role when it files, and it does not record a hire. Pay can change after it.
How to use it
If you’re aiming for a $300,000 base, the employers above are where the filings show it, and Member of Technical Staff and research titles reach it far more often than software engineer titles. What AI labs pay engineers covers the labs one by one.
Common questions
- Which engineering jobs pay $300,000 in base salary?
- In US visa wage filings for the twelve months to June 2026, 2,567 engineering and research filings, about 1.1% of the total, carried a base of $300,000 or more. Member of Technical Staff and research titles reached it far more often than software engineer titles, and the filings came from 517 employers.
- Which companies pay engineers $300,000 or more?
- The largest filers of $300,000 base salaries were NVIDIA (167), ByteDance (153), Meta (110), OpenAI (95), TikTok (92) and Google (90).
- How common is a $300,000 base salary for engineers?
- Rare. About 1.1% of engineering and research filings in the twelve months to June 2026 reached it.