Unless you have not been paying attention to Microsoft for the past 18 months, you know that the company has put in a ton of resources to develop its generative AI-based services. However, is appears that Microsoft is not only putting a lot of time and energy into its AI products, it's also paying the employees that are making these products.
A recent Business Insider post (under a paywall) claims to have obtained a spreadsheet of some of Microsoft's average employee salaries. If the spreadsheet is accurate. It shows that a software engineer in Microsoft's AI division is being paid up to $377,611 a year. That number includes both the base pay for the job, which is $192,667, plus stock and cash bonuses that total $184,994.
It's the large cash and stock bonuses that help a Microsoft AI engineer get more money than a team member who works at Microsoft's Azure cloud division. The spreadsheet posted by Business Insider shows that the total pay of an Azure team member can go up to $252,464 a year. The base pay is actually not much higher than the AI team member, as the Azure employee gets $174,196 a year. However, the team member's cash and stock bonuses are much lower, coming in at $77,268 a year.
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced it was launching a new AI division at the company, which would be led by Mustafa Suleyman, who previously was the co-founder of two AI companies, DeepMind and Inflection. Suleyman has the CEO title for Microsoft AI, similar to how Phil Spencer is the CEO of Microsoft Gaming.
As part of the AI division formation, Microsoft decided to move its Bing, Copilot, and Edge development teams under that AI banner. It remains to be seen of the establishment of the AI division, and its reportedly higher salaries, will make a difference in Microsoft's future AI plans.
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