Also called: Float Glass Engineer, Glass Manufacturing Engineer
Keeps a glass plant's furnaces and forming lines making flawless glass for windows, bottles, phone screens or car windshields.
Bubbles are showing up in the glass coming off the line, so you dig into furnace temperatures, raw-material batches and forming speeds to find the cause. You run tests with the lab, change a setting, and watch the defect rate drop. Then you plan a furnace rebuild that happens only once every 15 years.
Estimated from BLS materials engineers in glass manufacturing.
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 materials, ceramic, chemical or mechanical engineering.
Ways in: 4-year college. Training cost: $15k – $60k.
Majors to look at: Materials Science & Engineering, Ceramic Engineering, Chemical Engineering.
Growing faster than average (about 6% over 10 years). Materials engineers overall.
Low risk in 5 years, medium in 10. AI optimizes furnaces and spots defects with cameras; fixing process problems in a hot plant stays human.
Classes: AP Chemistry, AP Physics, AP Calculus.
Official data: O*NET occupation 17-2131.
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.