Credit: Henry Franklin via Shutterstock The highest-paying robotics job at OpenAI right now pays up to $500,000 and does not involve working directly with robots. This role is for a machine learning engineer, with a listed salary range of $380,000 to $500,000 plus equity, and the main responsibility is building the pipeline that supports training runs. OpenAI’s careers page lists 21 open robotics jobs, all based in San Francisco. After the top-paying roles, the salaries drop quickly.
For example, a robotics software engineer who needs five years of experience, fluency in Rust or C++, and a background in industrial automation can earn between $255,000 and $325,000. An inference engineer earns a fixed salary of $380,000. However, roles like actuator designer, firmware engineer, PCB layout engineer, and prototyping technician, who actually build the machines, do not have listed salary ranges. These amounts are just the base salaries.
Equity is offered in addition, so the advertised figures are more like minimums for total compensation rather than maximums. By OpenAI’s standards, these salaries are not unusual. Earlier this year, federal visa filings showed that research scientists at OpenAI can earn up to $685,000, and hardware engineers up to $555,000. The robotics salaries fall within the range the company already pays its top engineers, so this is just an extension of its current pay structure, not a special bonus for robotics.
The competition for talent has a ceiling, and robotics has not changed that. This information shows where OpenAI is focusing its efforts. The company shut down its robotics team in 2021 because, according to co-founder Wojciech Zaremba, the approach was solid but lacked key components, especially enough data. The team restarted in 2024, and OpenAI has since leased a 200,000-square-foot site in Richmond, across the bay.
The highest salary is linked to the issues raised in 2021 and reflects a specific salary range. The job listings do not say who these roles would report to. Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI from Meta in November 2024 to lead hardware and robotics, resigned in March over concerns about surveillance and autonomous weapons. No replacement has been named yet, so any reports listing her as the leader are now six months out of date.
OpenAI does not offer the highest pay in this area. Both Figure and Tesla have higher total compensation for senior engineers, though these numbers include more than just base salary, so direct comparisons are tricky. Physical Intelligence, a company focused solely on robotics, pays less than OpenAI’s top robotics group. 1X, which OpenAI supports and which opened a factory in California this year, does not share its pay bands. OpenAI has seen robotics mainly as a data problem, which explains the 21 open roles, the lack of a named leader, and the highest salary going to the person in charge of organizing the data.
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