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AI specialists in Poland now earn up to 50,000 zloty a month
A new pay report from Devire shows AI engineers and LLM solutions architects in Poland earning up to 50,000 zloty a month, as job listings in the category grew more than 2,000 percent in two years.
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Companies in Poland are locked in an open race for artificial intelligence specialists, and the salaries they're willing to pay keep hitting new records. The latest pay report from recruitment firm Devire shows that senior AI solutions architects can expect salaries of up to 50,000 zloty a month on an employment contract, while hourly rates on B2B contracts reach 300 zloty net per hour.
What companies are paying
The salary ranges in Devire's report vary sharply depending on specialization and experience level. LLM Engineers, meaning engineers working on large language models, earn between 15,000 and 42,000 zloty a month, while AI agent developers earn between 15,000 and 37,000 zloty. Classic machine learning engineers in Lead roles can expect salaries of up to 42,000 zloty, while junior positions start at 10,000 to 15,000 zloty.
On B2B contracts, net hourly rates for a senior LLM engineer range from 180 to 250 zloty, and for an AI solutions architect can reach as much as 300 zloty an hour. That puts it on par with the best-paid specializations in Polish IT, previously reserved mainly for cybersecurity experts and cloud architects.
We decided to break out AI as a separate category because our recruitment data shows it's no longer part of a bigger whole, but a standalone, rapidly growing market - Adam Ajtner, Strategic Relationship Manager, Devire
Where the wage pressure comes from
Devire's data confirms earlier observations from justjoin.it, which tracks Polish IT job listings on an ongoing basis. According to its analysis, the number of new listings in the AI/ML category grew by 70 percent in the second quarter of 2025 compared to the first, with another 16 percent added in the third quarter. In just the first three weeks of September 2025 alone, 392 new listings appeared, alongside 722 active recruitment processes running at the same time.
More than half of listings, 53.3 percent, target senior-level specialists, meaning companies have neither the time nor the appetite to train people from scratch. They want ready-made experts who can put generative models into production right away. Junior positions account for just 5.2 percent of all listings.
We're seeing a fundamental shift in how companies think about technology - Piotr Nowosielski, CEO, Just Join IT
Who's hiring, and where
The biggest employer remains the IT sector itself, accounting for more than a third of listings, followed closely by outsourcing firms and software houses with a 24.6 percent share. Recruitment agencies account for 10 percent of listings, consulting for 6 percent, and banking and finance for 3.5 percent, though growth in that last sector is notably faster than in previous years.
Geographically, the market is still concentrated in the largest hubs: Warsaw accounts for 30.1 percent of listings, Krakow for 17.9 percent, and Wroclaw for 14.5 percent. The Tricity area rounds out the top group with 10.9 percent. More than half of positions, 55.9 percent, are offered fully remote, with another 38.8 percent hybrid, meaning a company's headquarters increasingly has little bearing on where a specialist actually works.
What it means for employers and candidates
For employers, rising rates mean recruitment budgets need revisiting, especially in banking and consulting, where competition for the same people is pushing prices up further. For anyone considering a career switch, the signal is clear: the market rewards concrete implementation skills, hands-on work with LLMs and building AI agents, rather than general theoretical knowledge of machine learning.
The employment structure is shifting too. B2B contracts now make up 62.1 percent of listings versus 32 percent for traditional employment contracts, which for many specialists means higher nominal rates, but also shifts part of the tax and insurance risk onto them.
Analysts don't expect the market to cool anytime soon. Demand for AI skills is being driven both by large-scale generative AI rollouts in banking and e-commerce and by smaller companies just starting to build their own teams from scratch, often overpaying for their first hires with experience in production LLM deployments.
Sources: Devire AI Pay Report 2026 via My Company Polska (mycompanypolska.pl), AI Specialist Boom (itwiz.pl), Record Boom in AI Experts (infor.pl)
