Most technical roles have seen salary growth, but not all have benefited equally
2025 marked a turning point in the technology industry. After several years of layoffs, cautious hiring, and uncertainty, the sector is showing signs of recovery across the region.
At the same time, companies are rethinking how they prioritize and value talent. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just a talking point—it’s now embedded in hiring priorities, daily workflows, and compensation, as highlighted in Nodeflair’s latest annual salary report.
This year’s data, released today (May 4), shows that engineers with AI skills are earning significantly more than their peers, with some seeing pay drops of up to 25%. At the same time, great engineers continue to move forward, as companies place greater value on judgment, architecture, autonomy, and efficiency with AI tools.
In essence, AI is reshaping the tech career ladder and rewarding strong problem solvers at every level. Here’s the report’s breakdown and overall compensation changes for tech roles in Singapore, broken down by role and size:
[Disclaimer: Salary data are derived from Nodeflair’s proprietary database of over 130,000 data points, including user submissions that are verified by documents (payslips and offer letters) as well as job advertisements from various job portals. While a majority of the entries are backed by a sizeable amount of data, Nodeflair has flagged out entries with less than 200 data points as potentially lacking accuracy.]
Data scientists are the highest paid, earning up to S$25K per month
Based on salary data from NodeFlair’s proprietary database, lead data scientists are the highest paid role. Despite the overall decline of 8.3%, they still command an average monthly salary of S$25,000.
Meanwhile, software engineering managers earned up to S$20,100 per month, marking a 10.8% increase compared to last year.
Senior solutions engineers earn an average monthly salary of S$18,500, closely followed by senior product managers at S$18,100. Other top roles include mobile developers earning S$16,900, data engineers earning S$16,000, and platform (DevOps & SRE) earning S$15,200.
Roles at S$15,000 and below include lead cybersecurity engineers, lead data analysts, systems and IT leads, and senior quality assurance engineers.
On average, senior roles saw the strongest growth in wages, with wages rising by 12.6%. Lead roles followed at 11.6%, while managerial roles increased by 10.8%.
In contrast, mid- and junior-level roles recorded modest gains, with average salary increases of 1.7% and 5.3%, respectively.
AI skills are paying off
Apart from providing salary data, the NodeFlair report highlighted the widening salary gap between developers with and without AI skills.
Its analysis of 50 software developers shows that native AI talent is paid a clear premium.
The data found that junior software engineers (with zero to two years of experience) with AI skills saw a 25% pay rise on the median, earning S$6,000 per month compared to S$4,800 for those without AI skills.
Among mid-level engineers (two to five years of experience), those with AI skills earned 13% more than the 50th percentile—S$8,000 compared to S$7,100 for their non-AI peers.
At the top level (more than five years of experience), engineers with AI skills earned 18% more than the median, taking home S$10,000 compared to S$8,500 for those without.
AI fluency is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s now a bonus
Ethan Ang, founder of Nodeflair
“With the rise of tools like Claude Code and the broader wave of agent code flows, engineering teams are now rethinking how software is built around AI, which includes placing greater value on native AI developers,” he added.
- Read more articles we’ve written about Singapore career trends here.
Featured Image Credit: Shadow_of_light/depositphotos
