API Design Engineer Salary

Based on 201 API Design listings with published compensation (515 total jobs)

$227k
Average
$93k
Low Posted
201
With Salary
$600k
High Posted

API Design engineer salaries span a wide range depending on experience level, company size, and location. The published ranges on current matching listings run from $93k to $600k, with higher ranges typically tied to senior and lead roles at frontier AI labs, well-funded startups, and FAANG-tier teams shipping API Design features in production.

Compensation figures below are computed from 201 AI Dev Jobs listings with published salary ranges — a subset of the 515 total open API Design roles. Ranges reflect base salary in USD/year; total comp (equity, bonus, signing) is typically 1.3–2× base at top-paying companies. Remote roles increasingly match in-office rates for this skill.

By Experience Level

senior
230 jobs
$216k avg
lead
145 jobs
$250k avg
mid
93 jobs
$170k avg
junior
25 jobs
$165k avg
principal
22 jobs
$329k avg

Top Paying Companies for API Design

API Design Jobs by City

San Francisco, CA
128 jobs
$264k avg
New York, NY
40 jobs
$245k avg
Remote (US)
35 jobs
$203k avg
Remote
22 jobs
$190k avg
Bangalore, India
21 jobs
—
Mountain View, CA
18 jobs
$228k avg
United States
14 jobs
$180k avg
London, UK
13 jobs
—
Palo Alto, CA
11 jobs
$230k avg
Hyderabad, India
9 jobs
—

How this data is collected

AI Dev Jobs scrapes curated job feeds (Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever) from 538 ATS sources across 489 AI companies daily. Listings are filtered for AI/ML relevance; generalist roles are excluded. Salary figures come directly from the publicly posted compensation ranges on each listing — we do not estimate or impute. If a role doesn't publish a salary, it is excluded from these statistics but still appears in the job listings.

Data is refreshed every 24 hours. Average salary uses the midpoint of each published range. Experience-level and city-level figures use the same midpoint method, grouped by the experience_level and location fields on each listing.

Raw data available via the REST API or MCP server.

Browse 515 API Design Jobs

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