API proficiency in ChatGPT fetches Rs 30 lakh avg salary in India: Report

Bengaluru: Developers with API-level expertise in AI tools such as ChatGPT from OpenAI earn an average salary of Rs 30.3 lakh in India, with compensation mostly ranging from Rs 16 lakh to Rs 87.4 lakh across 64 profiles, according to data from US-based salary tracker 6figr.Those with skills in Gemini from Google earn an average salary of Rs 24.3 lakh, typically ranging from Rs 19.4 lakh to Rs 41.3 lakh, the platform’s data shows.Anthropic’s Claude appears as an outlier in the dataset. Employees who list Claude as a skill report an average salary of Rs 95 lakh, though the estimate is based on a single profile, making it less representative than the other figures.Globally, employees working at OpenAI earn an average compensation of about $819,800 (Rs 7.5 crore) annually, with salaries ranging from $612,300 (Rs 5.6 crore) to $2.4 million, based on 114 profiles, according to the report exclusively shared with TOI.

Core AI and LLM-related skills include Llama, OpenAI API, Gemini and Hugging Face, along with development frameworks and tooling such as LangChain, LangGraph, Langfuse, LLMOps and reranking. Supporting infrastructure skills include vector databases such as Qdrant and graph databases like Neo4j, while commonly used programming languages include Python, C++, JavaScript and TypeScript. AI applications are often deployed and served using tools such as FastAPI and Docker.

According to 6figr, the salary data is derived from verified or user-reported profiles rather than public job listings. The platform benchmarks pay using an AI-driven system that analyses real-time data from sources such as offer letters, pay slips and user profiles to compare compensation across companies, roles, locations and skills. It also uses tools such as a browser extension that analyses LinkedIn profiles to estimate market salaries for similar career paths and experience levels.“We believe only two types of white-collar jobs will exist in the future: either working full-time for frontier AI labs or training, annotating and labelling data for these labs, earning income through flexible, part-time engagements,” said Vinod Chandrashekar, founder of 6Figr.com, a US-based startup focused on AI and labour markets.