The last few weeks have been particularly positive for the bank accounts of some of the world’s biggest AI experts. Meta, Google and OpenAI have competed for the best minds with tempting offers that include outrageous salaries of hundreds of millions of dollars and efforts that sometimes include headhunting the top layer of executives from existing companies, to avoid acquiring the company.
Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is reportedly offering a salary of $300 million in exchange for four years of work on what he defines as the next natural AI engine that will mimic human intelligence. Google has made two huge multi-billion dollar talent acquisitions - the acquisition of two executives from Windsurf, and taking 30 executives out of 170 employees at Character for $2.5 billion, including entrepreneur Noam Shazir. Each of them has been handed fat contracts worth millions of dollars.
Israel has not yet seen such huge deals, but employees' salaries in the field are already creating a significant gap from the rest. Shiri Vax, CEO of tech placement company GotFriends, talks about the doubling of the number of jobs in the field in just six months, a precedent that illustrates the growing demand.
Even one year's experience can boost an AI salary
Vax says, "In Israel, there are no signing on bonuses of hundreds of millions of dollars like we see in Silicon Valley. But it is clear that developers who have worked for a total of one year on complex AI projects are enhancing their monthly salary offers by amounts ranging from NIS 3,000 to 15,000, and may receive a signing on bonus of up to six salaries - all in the last two months alone. It is not only that there is a shortage of such people - the entire profession is completely new, and workers with such expertise have barely entered the market."
The great demand for workers in the field of AI stems from two sources: one, jobs related to the application of AI to existing systems: improving existing products or developing tasks that shorten processes and save manpower and time. In this case, that engineer is involved in the implementation of existing language models and connecting them to existing products - so the salary increase compared to a regular software engineer in this field is NIS 3,000 on average.
However, the second category, which includes algorithm experts with a master's degree or higher who calibrate, tune, and improve language models - roles sometimes described as prompt or query engineers - can earn NIS 10,000-15,000 more than regular algorithm experts.
According to GotFriends, in the first half of 2025, AI jobs rose to the top of the Israeli tech salary table. For example, GenAI developers earn an average of NIS 46,755, compared with algorithm experts without specialization in the field, who earn NIS 42,255 per month. The gap also persists in the cybersecurity field, with an engineer with expertise in AI earning an average of NIS 2,000 more. There are also companies in the field that have adopted creative solutions: Startup Descartes rewards new employees with a contribution of up to 80% of the rent in the new Gindi Towers in Tel Aviv's Yad Eliyahu neighborhood.
Advanced degrees but no actual experience
For the more prestigious, higher-paying positions, companies have varying requirements - typically a few years of hands-on experience in deep learning or machine learning-based development, some prior experience working with a natural language model or large language model, some experience writing in the Python programming language, and sometimes experience as a data scientist and a bachelor's degree in the tech field, although this is not always presented as a threshold requirement. The desired language models are usually ChatGPT or Cloud, although more and more jobs also specify Google's Gemini as an advantage.
"The highest demand is for positions such as AI researchers, machine learning engineers or language modelers, as well as for candidates with a profile that combines an academic degree with work experience in the field of AI," says Aviv Yonas, VP Team8 VP HR . "Most of the talent in this field in Israel is academic researchers with advanced degrees in the field and no industry experience, or conversely, engineers with experience but no academic research background." The lack of training, says Yonas, is at the root of this: "In the cybersecurity field, for example, most professional training begins in military service, but the field of AI does not enjoy the same strength. So a gap has been created between the demand for a combination of knowhow and experience and the meager supply in Israel.
Yonas adds, "While every company today needs proven knowledge of AI as part of the work of development teams, the shortage is in specialist AI professionals, who are dedicated to the field, similar to cybersecurity engineers and researchers. The solution is not in specific courses but in an overall investment in the field that must be part of a national program, and as time goes by it will become more complex to narrow the gap."
The market currently has high demand for AI researchers with implementation capabilities or leaders in fields such as large language models (LLM), but the supply is insufficient. Yonas says, the salary is high and is in the top third of the market. "If the average salary in tech is about between NIS 27-32,000, then AI professionals earning around NIS 40,000 and more are not perceived as exceptional, similar to sought-after cybersecurity researchers."
Demand for managers to lead integration of AI in the enterprise
A new category in the field of AI jobs in Israel is for consulting and integration of AI systems in an enterprise to save the company processes, cutting back where possible and automating processes where necessary. In this case, these are not scientists but experienced managers whose job is to build AI teams, so that they can examine the integration of AI in software development, work processes, task management and other organizational processes. These are employees who are well-versed in the multitude of existing models and possible applications and are capable of upgrading organizations to the AI era.
These are managerial positions with an average monthly salary of NIS 60,000 - 80,000, sometimes supported by a signing on bonus of hundreds of thousands of shekels. "The reason that many organizations are willing to pay so much money for such managers is that employers understand that such a team will make their product efficient in the long run, will save manpower and allow for the development of additional products," says Vax.
At this point, there are almost no engineers in Israel who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the AI sector, because there are no engineers who develop language models from scratch, except perhaps a small number of employees at Prof. Amnon Shashua's AI21 Labs, Nvidia's software division, or the new office of in Israel of Safe Superintelligence, cofounded by Ilya Sutzkever, who left OpenAI. These are engineers who work directly with supercomputers and significant graphics processor clusters, scarce resources in Israel.
"It's possible that these are temporary gaps due to the shortage of AI engineers relative to demand, and as workers gain experience in the field, salaries will fall. Meanwhile, the situation is the reverse. There are quite a few companies that come to me and tell me that although their upper salary limit is NIS 40,000 per month, they have decided to disregard this restriction for hiring those with AI experience."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 20, 2025.
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