The highest-paid engineering discipline in the UK right now. Full salary ranges for ML Engineers — including LLM specialists, MLOps, and AI infrastructure roles in London.
Last updated: April 2026 | Source: 200,000+ UK job listings
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| Level | London range | National median |
|---|---|---|
| Junior ML Engineer (0–2 yrs) | £52,000–£68,000 | £42,000–£58,000 |
| Mid ML Engineer (3–5 yrs) | £85,000–£110,000 | £68,000–£90,000 |
| Senior ML Engineer (6–9 yrs) | £110,000–£145,000 | £88,000–£118,000 |
| Staff / Principal ML Engineer | £140,000–£185,000 | £110,000–£150,000 |
| ML Engineering Lead / Director | £170,000–£240,000+ | £130,000–£185,000 |
Engineers who specialise in building and deploying large language model applications are commanding the highest salaries in the UK technology market in 2026. The combination of deep ML knowledge, software engineering proficiency, and practical LLM deployment experience remains genuinely rare, and employer demand is at an all-time high.
| ML Specialisation | Median London salary | Demand trend |
|---|---|---|
| LLM / GenAI engineer | £125,000–£165,000 | +51% demand |
| MLOps / ML infrastructure | £105,000–£138,000 | +38% demand |
| Reinforcement learning | £115,000–£155,000 | +29% demand |
| Computer vision | £95,000–£128,000 | +19% demand |
| NLP engineering | £98,000–£130,000 | +24% demand |
| Traditional ML (scikit-learn) | £78,000–£105,000 | −6% demand |
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