Remote skills that pay double: AI/ML vs plain dev (in dollars)

Two developers with the same two years of experience can earn wildly different money remotely — the difference is the skill, not the years. Here’s the honest breakdown (reported ranges, verify before quoting).

Plain remote dev (general full-stack / web): commonly $1,500–3,000/month. Solid, but the floor.

The skills that pay roughly double:

• AI / ML engineering — often 1.5–2x a general dev rate. The AI-skill wage premium is reported around 56%, and ML openings have been climbing while generic roles shrink.
• Data engineering — pipelines, warehouses, SQL at scale. In heavy demand, pays well above plain dev.
• LLM / RAG / AI agents — building on top of models (retrieval, agents, evals). New, scarce, well-paid.
• Cloud / DevOps / MLOps — the people who ship and run all of the above.

How to move from the floor to double: you don’t restart. Keep your dev base and add one of these on top, then build a real project that proves it (a deployed ML app, a RAG system, a data pipeline). That one skill plus one proof project is what re-prices you.

The rule: don’t chase all of them. Pick one AI-adjacent skill, go deep, and ship something with it.