AI Workers in Their 20s Rake In High Salaries
BY KATHERINE BINDLEY
It’s a tough time to be a young person looking for a job—unless you’re in artificial intelligence.
The job market for entrylevel workers is in a continued slump. The unemployment rate for new college graduates was 4.8% in June, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, compared with 4% for all workers.
While AI is part of the reason for the doldrums, there is a bright spot when it comes to workers with actual experience in machine learning. They’re in their early 20s, they have AI know-how, and a bunch of them are making $1 million a year.
Base salaries for nonmanagerial workers in AI with zero to three years experience grew by around 12% from 2024 to 2025, the largest gain of any experience group, according to a new report by the AI staffing firm Burtch Works, which analyzed the compensation of thousands of AI and data-science candidates. The report also found that people with AI experience are being promoted to management roles roughly twice as fast as their counterparts in other technology fields. They’re jumping the ladder as a result of their skills and impact instead of their years on the job.
“There is a significant salary difference between a machine-learning engineer job and a software-engineer job,” said Anil K. Gupta, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and co-lead of its AI job tracker.
Databricks, the data-analytics software company whose value has skyrocketed during the AI boom, plans to triple the number of people it hires right out of school this year, in part because of their familiarity with AI.
“They’re going to come in, and they’re going to be all AI-native,” said Ali Ghodsi, the company’s chief executive. “We can’t for the life of us get the more senior people to adopt it.”
A generative-AI research scientist with as little as two years experience can make base salaries between $190,000 and $260,000 at Databricks, according to the company’s job-postings page. Including stock grants, the overall compensation can be much higher.
“We definitely have people, quite junior people, that have big impact, and they’re getting paid a lot,” Ghodsi said. “Under 25, you can be making a million.”
Even in the marketplace for people with AI experience, there is a bifurcation, said Jure Leskovec, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and co-founder of the startup Kumo.AI. He sees Ph.D. students in their early 20s produce effective research, leave their programs early and get snatched up by companies with large offers before they have any industry experience.
“The number of zeros is quite large,” he said.
Then there are those who are adept at using AI. They learn fast, think fast and are able to leverage the technology to be more effective. Though they don’t have the advanced degrees, the gap between them and conventional programmers is widening, he said.
“It’s almost like a next generation of a software engineer,” he said.
Many jobs for machine-learning engineers that require zero to a year of experience pay upward of $200,000 a year at companies like Roblox, according to Levels.fyi. The compensation-data provider has seen 42 user-submitted offers of over $1 million from AI companies. Of those, nine candidates had less than a decade of corporate workplace experience, though some might have had Ph.D.s. At Scale AI, which recently underwent a re--verse-acquihire deal with Meta Plat --forms, around 15% of employees are under the age of 25. Right out of school, employees at Scale AI can expect base salaries of around $200,000 a year.
“We’re eager to hire AI-native professionals, and many of those candidates are early in their careers,” said Ashli Shiftan, Scale AI’s head of people.
The company has gone as far as to threaten legal action against firms trying to poach its youngest talent.
Lily Ma, after graduating in December with an AI-concentration computer-science major from Carnegie Mellon University, applied for 30 to 40 jobs. She had interviews with about a dozen. “I did notice that having research experience helps a lot,” she said. (She also interned at Tesla.)
The 22-year-old landed at Scale AI but turned down some tempting offers, including from a startup that offered a 1% stake in the company.
Cyril Gorlla co-founded CTGT, a startup that makes safety and enterprise- risk software designed to fix such problems as AI hallucinations. Its investors include Google. He said the average age at his company is 21. Some of its employees’ equity is now worth about $500,000.
Gorlla, who himself is 23, has been receiving inbound requests from younger and younger prospective employees, including a 16-yearold who already had a paper published at an AI conference.
“I definitely did not see that a few years ago,” he said.
