Also called: DevEx Engineer, Internal Tools Engineer
Builds the tools other programmers use every day: build systems, code editors, testing frameworks, and AI coding helpers.
Your customers are your own coworkers. Today you are making the company's build run in 4 minutes instead of 20, and wiring an AI code-review bot into the pipeline.
Estimate based on software developer pay at tech firms.
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 CS or strong engineering experience.
Ways in: 4-year college, Self-taught. Training cost: $15k – $60k.
Majors to look at: Computer Science, Software Engineering.
Growing faster than average. Not separately tracked; demand rising as companies adopt AI coding tools.
Medium risk for 10 years. AI is remaking coding tools, which keeps devtools hiring busy, but agents also write much of the tooling code.
Classes: AP Computer Science A, AP Calculus, Physics.
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.