Also called: ML Engineer, AI Engineer
Builds, trains, and deploys the machine learning models inside products like recommendation feeds, fraud detection, and chatbots.
You fine-tune a model on new data, run experiments overnight on hundreds of GPUs, and check in the morning whether accuracy improved. Then you work out how to serve it to millions of users without it being slow or expensive.
Estimate; top AI labs pay far more, sometimes $500k+ in total compensation.
Approximate: anchored on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a broader job group.
Master's degree, about 5 years after high school. Bachelor's in CS or math required; many have a master's or PhD.
Ways in: 4-year college, Graduate school, Self-taught. Training cost: $15k – $60k.
Majors to look at: Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Electrical Engineering.
Growing much faster than average. Not separately tracked by BLS; one of the hottest hiring areas in tech.
Medium risk for 10 years. AutoML and coding agents handle model tuning and boilerplate; framing problems, data quality and deployment calls stay human.
Classes: AP Calculus, AP Statistics, AP Computer Science A, Linear algebra if offered.
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.