Saaras Mehan, co-founder of Jack & Jill, has raised the minimum salary for engineers at the company from £240,000 to £360,000, arguing that this is what London's AI talent is now worth.

The AI recruitment startup recently lifted its minimum engineering salary to £360,000, having raised it to £240,000 just nine months earlier. Mehan says people were shocked by the earlier increase and, judging by his LinkedIn messages, some remain shocked now. The figure sits far above typical UK software engineering pay—official earnings data has long placed median full-time developer salaries in the UK in the region of £50,000–£60,000—underscoring how far AI-specialist compensation has diverged from the wider market.

According to Mehan, many companies—particularly in London—still operate on the assumption that an individual's impact is measured in a linear way: a 10 per cent productivity gain justifies a 10 per cent pay rise. "That model is broken," he writes. "And the world needs to catch up."

A founding belief

When Mehan and his co-founder established Jack & Jill, they wrote down a founding belief about the kind of company they wanted to build: "We believe tiny teams of talent-dense individuals can outperform larger ones. We're going to pay well above-market compensation to build a tiny team capable of having an outsized impact and doing the best work of their lives."

Mehan says this conviction predated the AI boom, but everything he has seen over the past year has reinforced it. Give an exceptional engineer AI tools and they can achieve far more, he argues, noting that he sees the impact individual team members can have within hours of joining.

The old playbook for scaling ambition was to add more people, he explains. Now, AI agents multiply each person's impact, allowing companies to grow more with less. As a result, recruiting a small number of the very best people is both more important and more difficult than ever.

Competition has risen over the last year

Over the past year, London's tech scene has changed completely, Mehan writes. The city has attracted frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, along with some of the fastest-growing companies of all time, such as Cursor.

These companies previously established London hubs for sales. Now they are in the city for engineering talent—and paying heavily for it. This, Mehan argues, creates a new floor and a new set of expectations for engineers living in London. The shift mirrors the aggressive, multi-million-dollar compensation packages that frontier AI labs have reportedly offered researchers in the US, where competition for a small pool of AI-capable engineers has been intense.

He frames the shift as part of a broader market movement. Internal data from Jack & Jill's talent marketplace shows engineering pay expectations have risen by around 10 per cent in the UK and almost 20 per cent in the US.

Mehan also points to another growing and less visible source of competition for talent: there has never been a better time for remarkable engineers to build companies of their own.

How Jack & Jill attracts top engineers

For engineers at this level, the biggest question is the opportunity cost of their time, according to Mehan. With so many options open to them, the company aims to offer a place where their time is most valuable.

In almost every interview, top engineers tell the company that the people around them matter most, Mehan says. While salary is a significant part of the decision, paying at the top end is ultimately about the environment it enables—one that lets the firm assemble a group other exceptional people want to join. Once that group exists, a snowball effect takes hold: the best engineers want to work alongside other excellent engineers.

Optimism about London and the UK

Remarkable engineers have always created disproportionate value, Mehan writes, and AI only increases their leverage. Historically, working at a top tech company may have required relocating to San Francisco; today it is possible to work at the cutting edge from London.

For Mehan, the fact that London now pays at the top end is a clear signal of the city's technological and economic ambition. Whether the capital can sustain this momentum will depend in part on how the wider pool of UK employers respond to the new pay floor that AI-focused firms are setting.

Some will still look at a £360,000-plus salary and see an inflated figure, he concludes. He sees it as the price of entry to the value London's best engineers can now create.

Saaras Mehan is the co-founder of AI recruitment startup Jack & Jill.