Salary guide
Physical AI Salary Guide
Compensation benchmarks for robotics, autonomy, simulation, controls, perception, and related Physical AI jobs. Figures use public listings with annual USD salary data and exclude clear outliers.
Median salary
$196,600
75th percentile
$231,500
90th percentile
$272,000
Salary samples
1,828
Salary by role area
Role areas are based on topic matches across active public listings. Median and upper-quartile values use annual USD midpoint salary data.
| Role area | Median | 75th pct. | Samples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Autonomy Jobs | $200,500 | $238,000 | 1,313 |
| Physical AI Jobs | $205,000 | $238,250 | 1,302 |
| Robotics Jobs | $195,050 | $223,750 | 1,163 |
| Simulation Jobs | $217,550 | $252,000 | 762 |
| Robot Perception Engineer Jobs | $210,000 | $242,540 | 703 |
| Controls Engineer Jobs | $193,000 | $222,500 | 509 |
| Embodied AI Jobs | $216,250 | $260,550 | 305 |
| Motion Planning Jobs | $210,000 | $240,000 | 265 |
| SLAM Engineer Jobs | $211,000 | $242,540 | 259 |
| SLAM Jobs | $211,000 | $242,540 | 259 |
| Robotics Engineer Jobs | $217,550 | $256,000 | 123 |
| ROS Jobs | $197,750 | $210,000 | 111 |
Salary by location
| Location | Median | 75th pct. | Samples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mountain View, USA | $235,500 | $270,000 | 299 |
| Palo Alto, USA | $196,000 | $254,000 | 168 |
| Costa Mesa, USA | $193,000 | $222,000 | 138 |
| San Francisco, USA | $231,500 | $270,000 | 109 |
| South San Francisco, USA | $183,500 | $205,000 | 100 |
| Sunnyvale, USA | $234,500 | $289,900 | 97 |
| Fremont, USA | $175,000 | $220,000 | 87 |
| North Reading, USA | $168,000 | $177,650 | 61 |
| Pittsburgh, USA | $195,000 | $238,000 | 58 |
| Santa Clara, USA | $215,000 | $235,200 | 58 |
| Torrance, USA | $182,500 | $224,250 | 58 |
| San Mateo, USA | $200,000 | $223,000 | 57 |
Remote vs onsite salary
Unspecified
$196,000
1,418 samples
Onsite
$189,050
153 samples
Hybrid
$211,000
151 samples
Remote
$195,050
106 samples
Salary by skill
Methodology
This page uses approved public jobs on Physical AI Jobs with annual USD salary data. For salary ranges, the midpoint is used. Listings with unusually low or high midpoint compensation are excluded to reduce distortion from parsing errors, equity-like numbers, hourly values, or malformed postings.
Many companies do not publish compensation, so salary tables should be read as directional benchmarks, not a complete market census.