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About This Role
San Francisco, CA
Requisition ID 2026\-121646 Category Data Analytics and Strategy Position type Regular Pay range USD $180,000\.00 \- $250,000\.00 / Year Application deadline 2026\-07\-28
Your opportunity
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At Schwab, you’re empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us challenge the status quo and transform the finance industry together. We believe in the importance of in‑office collaboration and fully intend for the selected candidate for this role to work on site in the specified location(s).
As an AI Researcher within Schwab’s AI Strategy \& Transformation (AI.x) organization, you’ll operate at the intersection of advanced applied research and production‑grade AI systems that support millions of investors, advisors, and employees. This role is designed for researchers who want their work to ship, scale, and deliver measurable impact in real environments—where latency, reliability, cost, and regulatory considerations matter as much as model performance.
In this role, you’ll take ideas from early problem formulation through modeling, evaluation, deployment, and iteration, contributing directly to LLM and Agentic\-based systems used across the enterprise. Your work will include designing and operating large‑language‑model‑based and agent‑driven systems, establishing robust evaluation and monitoring practices, and improving performance under real‑world constraints. You’ll collaborate closely with platform engineers, product partners, and risk stakeholders to ensure solutions are accurate, observable, safe, and reliable in a regulated financial services environment.
Success in this role is measured by production impact and sustained system quality—not novelty alone. Over time, your contributions will help shape Schwab’s AI standards and best practices, influence how AI is responsibly deployed at scale, and strengthen the firm’s long‑term AI capabilities.
This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, CA, with regular in‑office collaboration to support complex technical work.What you have
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Required Qualifications* Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Physics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 7\+ years of experience building, deploying, and operating machine learning or AI systems using Python in production environments.
- Demonstrated experience delivering GenAI or LLM‑powered applications that are actively used by clients or internal teams.
- Strong grounding in data analysis (Python, SQL, Pandas), experimentation, and evaluation, with the ability to assess model quality, reliability, and trade‑offs under real constraints.
- Experience working cross‑functionally with engineering, product, and other stakeholders to move complex technical work from concept to production.
Preferred Qualifications* Experience designing or operating agentic‑based or orchestrated AI systems, including tool‑enabled or multi‑step workflows.
- Familiarity with AI evaluation, monitoring, or reliability practices that support long‑running production systems.
- Experience operating AI solutions in regulated, high‑stakes, or risk‑sensitive environments.
- Technical leadership or mentoring experience, including influencing standards, patterns, or best practices across teams.
In addition to the salary range, this role is also eligible for bonus or incentive opportunities.What’s in it for you
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At Schwab, you’re empowered to shape your future. We champion your growth through meaningful work, continuous learning, and a culture of trust and collaboration—so you can build the skills to make a lasting impact. Our Hybrid Work and Flexibility approach balances our ongoing commitment to workplace flexibility, serving our clients, and our strong belief in the value of being together in person on a regular basis.
We offer a competitive benefits package that takes care of the whole you – both today and in the future:
- 401(k) with company match and Employee stock purchase plan
- Paid time for vacation, volunteering, and 28\-day sabbatical after every 5 years of service for eligible positions
- Paid parental leave and family building benefits
- Tuition reimbursement
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
### Share:
- X
Eligible Schwabbies receive
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- Medical, dental and vision benefits
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- 401(k) and employee stock purchase plans
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- Tuition reimbursement to keep developing your career
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- Paid parental leave and adoption/family building benefits
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- Sabbatical leave available after five years of employment
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Salary Context
This $180K-$250K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 1841 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 3,708 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At Charles Schwab, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $218,750 based on 3,817 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $200,000. Disclosed range: $180K to $250K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($300,000) and Research Engineer ($280,000). By seniority level: Entry: $120,000; Mid: $200,000; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,150; VP: $250,000.
Charles Schwab AI Hiring
Charles Schwab has 8 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Software Engineer, Data Scientist. Positions span San Francisco, CA, US, Austin, TX, US, Southlake, TX, US. Compensation range: $139K - $250K.
Location Context
AI roles in San Francisco pay a median of $277,088 across 810 tracked positions. That's 27% above the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,708 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 102 entry-level, 1,705 mid-level, 1,469 senior, and 432 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 14% of the market (508 positions). The remaining 3,180 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($300,000 median, 21 roles); Research Engineer ($280,000 median, 147 roles); AI Architect ($254,798 median, 67 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,708 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,605), Data Scientist (310), AI Software Engineer (259). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (102) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,705) and senior (1,469) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 432 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 14% of all AI roles (508 positions), with 3,180 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $217,500. Top-quartile roles start at $272,100, and the 90th percentile reaches $325,000. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $300,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,890 postings), Aws (1,103 postings), Azure (877 postings), Rag (855 postings), Gcp (631 postings), Prompt Engineering (560 postings), Pytorch (545 postings), Claude (498 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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