By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-10-12 07:24:00
Google DeepMind is hiring engineers for Polaris, a new team that builds tests to measure how well Gemini handles real software engineering work. The pay stands out. Total compensation runs from $550,000 to $1.1 million a year, and you don’t need a degree to apply.Tamay Besiroglu, an Epoch AI co-founder who now works on data at Google DeepMind, kept the brief simple in a post on X. “All we care about is you being smart and able to solve hard problems,” he wrote, adding that people should ignore the pay mentioned in the job ad. When asked whether the listing was wrong, he clarified that its numbers were accurate but left out equity. The base salary alone sits between $164,000 and $252,000.
Every Polaris test for Gemini takes about a week to build
The role, listed as Research Engineer and based in Mountain View, California, centres on designing tasks. Each one is a detailed exam for Gemini, made up of a prompt telling the model what to do…
