Meta engineer salaries are surging as the social media giant races to lock in scarce artificial intelligence talent worldwide.
Internal pay data drawn from more than 5,800 US work-visa filings shows Meta offering some of the highest base packages in Big Tech for 2025. According to figures analysed by Business Insider, software engineers at Meta were paid base salaries of up to 450,000 dollars a year, while research engineers reached about 400,000 dollars.
Product managers working on core products and AI features also benefited, with some roles nearing 348,000 dollars before any extras were added.
Most Meta engineer salaries for new hires fell between 150,000 and 250,000 dollars, underlining how strongly even mid-level positions are rewarded.
Roughly half of all roles in the visa data were software engineering posts, and product designers as well as user-experience researchers often crossed the 200,000-dollar mark.
The most senior AI jobs at Meta sit in a different bracket altogether.
Visa filings and company data indicate that a vice-president of AI commanded a base salary of about 650,000 dollars, before stock or bonuses were counted.
Industry reports suggest Meta has been willing to assemble multi-year pay deals for elite AI researchers that can run into hundreds of millions of dollars in total value, as it builds a new "superintelligence" lab.
However, Meta executives have pushed back on claims that individual recruits are being handed 100-million-dollar up-front signing bonuses, saying such figures usually reflect long-term packages combining salary, equity and incentives.
For most staff, the headline base salary tells only part of the story.
Meta engineer salaries are frequently supplemented with annual bonuses and sizeable stock grants, meaning total compensation can double or in some senior AI cases even multiply several times over the base figure.
External compensation trackers show median total pay for Meta software engineers in the US reaching around 420,000 dollars once stock and incentives are included, with the very highest-level engineers earning several million dollars a year.
Meta finished 2025 with 78,865 employees globally, a headcount increase of about 6% compared with the previous year, even after a period of cost-cutting and layoffs in some teams.
US visa applications from major tech firms, including Meta, have eased amid tighter scrutiny and restructuring, but the company continues to prioritise AI hiring across its core apps, messaging services and payments business.
Meta engineer salaries now sit at the sharp end of a global AI talent arms race, where experienced researchers and engineers can command unprecedented rewards.
As Meta and its rivals chase a limited pool of specialists, generous base pay, equity and long-term incentive plans are likely to remain central to how Silicon Valley courts the people building the next generation of AI systems.