Building, testing, and steering the AI systems that are reshaping almost every job, including the jobs in this list.
Top pay: highest pay, longest training
Machine Learning Engineer: Builds, trains, and deploys the machine learning models inside products like recommendation feeds, fraud detection, and chatbots. Typical pay $170k.
AI Research Scientist: Invents new AI methods and pushes the frontier of what machines can learn. Typical pay $140k.
Applied AI / LLM Engineer: Builds products on top of large language models: chat assistants, AI agents, search, and automation. Typical pay $155k.
Computer Vision Engineer: Teaches computers to understand images and video, for self-driving cars, medical scans, factory inspection, and phones. Typical pay $155k.
ML Infrastructure / MLOps Engineer: Builds and runs the giant computer clusters and software pipelines that train and serve AI models. Typical pay $165k.
AI Safety Researcher: Studies how to make powerful AI systems honest, controllable, and safe. Typical pay $180k.
AI Red Teamer: Tries to trick, jailbreak, and break AI systems so weaknesses get fixed before bad actors find them. Typical pay $140k.
Forward-Deployed Engineer: An engineer who works on-site with customers to make AI and data software actually solve their problems. Typical pay $160k.
AI Evaluation Engineer: Designs the tests and benchmarks that measure how smart, accurate, and safe an AI model is. Typical pay $145k.
Responsible AI Specialist: Helps organizations use AI fairly, legally, and safely by writing policies and auditing AI systems. Typical pay $110k.
AI Agent Engineer: Builds AI "agents" that can take actions on their own, like booking travel or fixing code, using large language models. Typical pay $165k.
AI Solutions Architect: Designs how a big company should plug AI into its systems safely and affordably. Typical pay $175k.
Synthetic Data Engineer: Creates realistic fake data, like computer-generated street scenes or medical records, to train AI safely. Typical pay $155k.
Recommendation Systems Engineer: Builds the algorithms that decide what video, song or product you see next. Typical pay $170k.
GPU Kernel Engineer: Writes very low-level code that makes AI models run as fast as possible on graphics chips. Typical pay $200k.
AI Data Licensing Manager: Negotiates deals with publishers, photo libraries and websites so AI companies can legally train models on their text, images and video. Typical pay $155k.
Content Provenance Engineer: Builds the hidden 'nutrition labels' inside photos and videos that record who made them and whether AI edited them, so fakes are easier to catch. Typical pay $150k.
AI Research Engineer: Builds the code, training runs and experiments that turn AI researchers' ideas into working models. Typical pay $180k.
ML Inference Engineer: Makes trained AI models answer fast and cheaply for millions of users by tuning how they run on chips and servers. Typical pay $175k.
Speech AI Engineer: Builds the AI that turns speech into text and text into natural-sounding voices, for assistants, captions and call centers. Typical pay $165k.
Mid pay: solid pay, degree or apprenticeship
Conversation Designer: Designs how chatbots and voice assistants talk: their personality, flow, and what they say when they get confused. Typical pay $95k.
AI Implementation Consultant: Helps businesses figure out where AI can help and then sets it up. Typical pay $90k.
Expert AI Trainer: A subject-matter expert (doctor, coder, lawyer, chemist) paid to write and grade the examples that teach AI models. Typical pay $80k.
Prompt Engineer: Writes and tests the instructions that tell AI models how to behave in a product. Typical pay $105k.
Algorithmic Bias Auditor: Tests hiring, lending and other decision-making software from the outside to check whether it treats groups of people unfairly, often because a law requires it. Typical pay $105k.
Data Annotation Lead: Runs a team of people who label data and grade AI answers, writing the guidelines and checking quality so the data is good enough to train AI. Typical pay $75k.
Starter: fastest way in
Data Annotator / Labeler: Labels images, text, audio, and video so AI systems can learn from them. Typical pay $35k.
Search & AI Quality Rater: Rates whether search results and AI answers are accurate, useful, and safe. Typical pay $32k.
AI Chatbot Support Specialist: Watches over a company's customer-service chatbot, fixing wrong answers and handling cases the bot can't. Typical pay $50k.
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.