Also called: Industrial IoT Engineer, Smart Factory Engineer
Connects every machine in a plant to software that tracks what's being built, by whom, and how well, in real time.
You wire up a new stamping press so it reports its count and downtime to the plant dashboard. A supervisor complains the screen shows the wrong numbers, so you dig into the database and find a misconfigured sensor tag. You spend the afternoon planning how to connect 40 older machines that were never meant to talk to computers.
Estimate; overlaps IT and engineering pay.
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, industrial or electrical engineering, or computer science.
Ways in: 4-year college. Training cost: $15k – $60k.
Majors to look at: Computer Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Computer Science.
Growing faster than average. No separate BLS projection; growing with factory digitization.
Medium risk for 10 years. AI copilots write integrations and reports; mapping messy plant processes and keeping production systems running stay human.
Classes: AP Computer Science, AP Statistics, Business or IT class.
Official data: O*NET occupation 15-1299.
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.