Benchmark Startup Data Scientist Pay in San Francisco

Say you run a 30-person startup in San Francisco and you are about to open your first data scientist role. The board wants the offer band on Friday, and the salary surveys you can find are last year’s and blended across big tech. What you actually need is what other startups of your size are posting right now, in this city, for this title. Wellfound is where those startups post, and most of them publish a pay range.

The manual way, and what it costs

For a quick look, the free search is fine: pick Data Scientist and San Francisco and read the cards. On 29 September 2026 that search said 67 results across 3 pages. If you want a feel for the market in ten minutes, scroll it and stop there.

A band you can defend is another job. Each card shows the range as text (“$200k – $400k”), so to get a median you copy 60-odd ranges into a sheet and split them by hand, then open each job again to learn whether equity is on offer, which the card only sometimes shows. Wellfound has no export, so next quarter’s refresh means doing all of it again.

The faster way

Wellfound Startup Jobs Scraper & Hiring Signals does the same search once and hands back every row at once.

{
  "role": "data scientist",
  "location": "san francisco",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Role plus location sends the search to Wellfound’s narrow role-and-city index, the same 67 the page counts. maxResults: 100 is above that, so you get everything the search can reach: 60 jobs on the run behind this article, in 1.9 seconds, with a free row explaining that the last 7 sit beyond the pages Wellfound serves. At $1.75 per 1,000 jobs, the whole benchmark costs about 11 cents.

What comes back

A real row from that run (description shortened):

{
  "source_url": "https://wellfound.com/jobs/4046117-data-scientist",
  "title": "Data Scientist",
  "job_type": "full-time",
  "compensation": "$200k – $400k",
  "salary_min": 200000,
  "salary_max": 400000,
  "has_equity": null,
  "remote": false,
  "locations": ["San Francisco"],
  "posted_date": "2026-04-01",
  "company_name": "Triumph Arcade",
  "company_tagline": "The fastest growing real-money mobile gaming platform",
  "company_size": "SIZE_11_50",
  "hiring_badges": ["ACTIVELY_HIRING", "COMPANY_STAGE", "GROWING_FAST", "QUICK_RESPONDER", "TOP_INVESTORS"],
  "actively_hiring": true,
  "matched_by": "role_and_location"
}

Field	Example value	Meaning
salary_min / salary_max	200000 / 400000	The posted range in dollars, parsed from Wellfound’s pay string
has_equity	—	True when equity is offered, false when the posting says none, null when unstated
company_size	SIZE_11_50	Wellfound’s own headcount bucket
job_type	full-time	full-time, internship, cofounder, and so on
posted_date	2026-04-01	When the job went up

salary_min and salary_max are the columns that answer the board. On the 55 full-time jobs, 45 posted a range, and the median range ran from $180,000 to $250,000. Filter company_size to the two smallest buckets and the median top of range falls to $222,500 across 24 postings, against $273,000 across 21 at bigger companies, which is the comparison a 30-person company should make. Six postings named an equity range, from 0.002% at the low end to 2.0% at Rhizome AI.

What you’d do with it

Sort by company_size, keep SIZE_11_50 and SIZE_51_200, and take the 25th to 75th percentile of salary_max as your band; the posting link on every row lets you read the three closest job descriptions before you write your own. Rerun it in January with roles set to data scientist and machine learning engineer, and you get both markets in one run for the same $1.75 per 1,000 jobs.

Worth knowing

A posted range is not what anyone was paid: this is what 45 companies were willing to write down, and some ranges are wide enough to be a signal in themselves ($250k to $500k at Mercor). The city index also includes jobs that list San Francisco among several locations, and 11 of the 55 full-time jobs are marked remote. company_size is a bucket, not a headcount, and Wellfound stops serving pages after its limit, so 7 of the 67 jobs were out of reach on this run.

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Run it yourself: How to run Wellfound Startup Jobs Scraper & Hiring Signals walks the whole thing step by step.

If the question is which of these startups hire across every job board they post to, not only Wellfound, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby & Workday Jobs Scraper with Salaries takes a company domain and returns every open job, with its posted salary range, from the board behind its career page. It can also search about 9,400 company boards with no list at all; see Benchmark Software Engineer Pay From Posted Salary Ranges.