Why London’s AI engineers are worth £360,000+

Jack & Jill co-founder Saaras Mehan just hiked the minimum salary for engineers from £240,000 to £360,000. He says that’s what London’s AI talent is worth

We recently raised our minimum salary for engineers to £360,000. Nine months earlier, we had raised it to £240,000. People were shocked then and, judging by my Linkedin DMs, some are still shocked now.

A lot of companies, especially in London, are still living in the world where a single person’s impact is measured on the very linear basis that you get a 10 per cent increase in your salary because you were 10 per cent more productive. That model is broken. And the world needs to catch up.

When my co-founder and I founded Jack & Jill, we wrote down a founding belief about the kind of company we wanted to build: “We believe tiny teams of talent-dense individuals can outperform larger ones. We’re going to pay well above-market compensation to build a tiny team capable of having an outsized impact and doing the best work of their lives.”

This was true before AI. Everything we’ve seen over the last year has made us even more convinced of it. Give an exceptional engineer AI and they can achieve a lot more. I see it every day in the impact individual team members can have within literal hours of walking through the door.

The old playbook was adding more people to scale your ambition. Now, AI agents multiply each person’s impact, allowing companies to grow more with less.

Recruiting a small number of the very best people is therefore more important, and at the same time more difficult, than ever.

Competition has risen over the last year

Over the last year, London’s tech scene has completely changed. It has attracted frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and some of the fastest-growing companies of all time, like Cursor.

These companies used to set up hubs for sales. Now they’re here for the engineering talent, and they’re paying a lot for it. This creates a new floor and set of expectations for engineers living here.

We see that it’s part of a broader market shift. Our internal data from Jack & Jill’s talent marketplace shows engineering pay expectations have risen by around 10 per cent in the UK and almost 20 per cent in the US.

There’s also another growing, and unseen, source of competition for talent: there’s never been a better time for remarkable engineers to build companies of their own.

What we’re doing to attract the best engineers

For people at this level, the biggest question is the opportunity cost of their time. They have so many opportunities ahead of them, so we want to offer a place where their time will be most valuable.

In almost every interview, top engineers tell us that the people around them are what really matters most. Salary is a big part of the decision, but for us, paying at the top end is really about the environment it allows us to create.

It lets us assemble a group that other exceptional people want to join. Once that group is in place, it creates a snowballing effect. The best engineers want to work with other excellent engineers.

Excited for the future of London and the UK

Remarkable engineers have always created disproportionate value. AI only increases their leverage.

Historically, you may have needed to relocate to San Francisco to work at a top tech company. Now you can work at the cutting edge from London.

For me, the fact that London is now paying at the top end is a clear sign of the technological and economic ambition here.

Some will still read £360,000+ and see an inflated salary. I see it as the price of entry to how much value London’s best engineers can now create.

Saaras Mehan is the co-founder of AI recruitment startup Jack & Jill