How to Make Money with AI: Pivot to become an AI Talent for hire
- Niv Nissenson
- Jul 2
- 2 min read
Oh the irony: the very companies racing to build AI that could one day replace programmers are also shelling out record-breaking salaries to hire them. If you’re highly technical or already a software engineer and still debating whether to pivot into AI — you should seriously consider joining the AI band wagon. The market has spoken, and it’s screaming for skilled AI people.
A recent Business Insider article revealed that Mira Murati’s new stealth AI startup Thinking Machines (the startup who just shattered all seed round records with a $10Bn valuation) is already offering compensation packages ranging upwards of $500,000 to lure top technical talent. And this is hardly a fluke. Across the board, big AI companies — from OpenAI and Anthropic to Google DeepMind and xAI — are locked in a hiring arms race, driving salaries for serious AI engineers and researchers into the stratosphere.
Meanwhile, there’s an ongoing joke in startup circles that Mark Zuckerberg is personally calling every small AI founder, offering buyouts in a bid to keep Meta from falling too far behind. There was even rumors of $100M signing bonuses. Whether or not that’s literally true, it reflects a very real scramble. Meta knows it has to catch up, and is throwing mountains of cash at anyone who can help it build the next generation of AI infrastructure.
So what does this mean for you? The biggest paydays right now are clearly aimed at software engineers, researchers, and technical leads who already have hands-on experience building or scaling advanced AI systems — often at places like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, or Anthropic. Companies aren’t throwing million-dollar offers at just anyone who dabbles in AI; they’re paying up for proven talent that can immediately accelerate their race to build the next generation of large-scale models and infrastructure.
But it’s not only about PhD-level research or inventing new algorithms. There’s also strong demand for adjacent skills: data pipeline engineers, distributed systems specialists, optimization experts, and developers who know how to integrate AI into real products. If you’re already in software — especially if you’ve touched data-intensive systems — there’s a viable path to pivot into these AI-adjacent roles. It may take focused study and side projects to build credibility, but the opportunity is there.
As the data from sources like Mary Meeker's AI trends report we’re witnessing what could become the biggest technical hiring boom since the early internet days, funded by venture capital and tech giants desperate not to miss the next platform shift. For those serious about getting in, this might be the most direct way to make substantial money from the AI revolution — by helping build it.
