San Francisco still concentrates the highest density of frontier-lab + AI-native implementer hiring of any single metro globally — roughly 42% of all platform-tracked roles list SF or Bay Area as primary location. The frontier-lab cluster (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google AI, Scale, Databricks) accounts for the top of the comp band: $295-$485K TC for senior FDE / Applied AI roles is now standard, with equity layered on top. Below the frontier, the YC + a16z portfolio segment (Cursor, Replit, Linear, Notion, Reflection, Parafin, Mercury, etc.) is hiring 4-8 implementers per company at TC bands $245-$370K. Hybrid (3 days in-office) is now the default at frontier labs; pure remote at SF-headquartered companies has compressed by ~40% YoY. Engineers willing to relocate get meaningful packages, but the market also rewards distributed-remote candidates who can still travel onsite quarterly.
Editorial commentary reflects the broader market — the strip above reflects only roles ingested through our ingest pipeline (subset).