Also called: Agentic AI Engineer, LLM Applications Engineer
Builds AI "agents" that can take actions on their own, like booking travel or fixing code, using large language models.
You connect an AI model to a company's tools so it can look up orders and issue refunds by itself. Most of your day is testing: watching the agent work through 200 practice cases, finding where it gets confused, and adding guardrails so it never does anything risky.
New title (2024+); pay figures come from job postings, not BLS.
Approximate: anchored on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a broader job group.
Bachelor's degree (4-year), about 4 years after high school. Bachelor's in computer science; strong software skills matter more than a PhD.
Ways in: 4-year college, Self-taught, Graduate school. Training cost: $15k – $60k.
Majors to look at: Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science.
Growing much faster than average. One of the fastest-growing AI job titles in 2025-26.
Low risk in 5 years, medium in 10. Agent building is a hot new field; AI writes much of the code, but designing reliable, safe agents stays human work.
Classes: AP Computer Science A, AP Statistics, AP Calculus.
Official data: O*NET occupation 15-1252.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.