---
title: OpenAI Hires More Engineers From Meta Than From Any Other Company
description: Meta is OpenAI's biggest source of engineers, Levels.fyi data shows, and OpenAI's senior median offer of $775,000 is 74% above Meta's.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-11-10T15:24:47.833Z
updated: 2026-11-10T15:24:47.849Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/openai-hires-most-engineers-from-meta-levels-fyi
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/meta-mpk21-bowl-courtyard-employees-549209.webp
categories: Artificial Intelligence
content_type: News
region: United States
publication: Sovereign Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
about:
  - type: Organization
    name: Meta
    description: American technology company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
  - type: Organization
    name: OpenAI
    description: American artificial intelligence company, developer of the ChatGPT chatbot and the GPT family of models.
---

Meta is the biggest single source of OpenAI's engineers, according to hiring data that Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of the pay-tracking site Levels.fyi, posted on X on Friday. OpenAI's median offer to a senior engineer is $775,000, about 74% more than the median at Meta.

Musa's chart, made with the workforce-data firm Live Data Technologies, shows that 294 of the engineers OpenAI hired between October 2024 and September 2026 came from Meta, a count that includes Instagram. Google supplied 245, with another 47 from Google DeepMind, and Apple 200. Amazon and AWS followed with 82, Stripe with 62 and Microsoft with 61. Ten came from Anthropic.

By Levels.fyi's figures, Meta's median new offer at senior level is $446,000. The gap is widest for engineers from Apple, where the median is $355,000, and Microsoft, at $310,000: OpenAI's median is 118% and 150% higher. "At senior level, OpenAI's median offer is over 2x Apple's," Musa [wrote](https://x.com/zuhayeer/status/2118791549039612292). Even against Anthropic, the best-paying company on the chart at $570,000, OpenAI's median is 36% higher. Levels.fyi compared median new offers at its standard Senior level in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York from October 2024 to October 2026, based its OpenAI figure on 20 offers, and did not compare individual offers.

---

*This article is only available to registered readers. Visit the article URL to read the full piece.*