Medical Devices & Biomedical Engineering

Where engineering meets medicine: inventing, building, approving, selling, and fixing the machines and implants that keep people alive.

Top pay: highest pay, longest training

• Surgical Robotics Engineer: Designs and improves robots that help surgeons operate with superhuman precision. Typical pay $135k.
• Neural Engineer: Builds devices that connect to the nervous system, like brain implants, cochlear implants, and nerve stimulators. Typical pay $140k.
• Surgical Device Sales Representative: Sells implants and surgical devices and often stands in the operating room advising surgeons on how to use them. Typical pay $130k.
• Regulatory Affairs Manager (Medical Devices): Guides new medical devices through FDA approval and keeps them compliant. Typical pay $140k.
• Human Factors Engineer (Medical): Makes medical devices easy and safe to use so nurses and patients don't make deadly mistakes. Typical pay $115k.
• Medical Device Software Engineer: Writes the code that runs pacemakers, insulin pumps, imaging machines, and medical apps. Typical pay $130k.
• Medical Device Cybersecurity Engineer: Protects connected medical devices like infusion pumps from hackers, testing them for weak spots and writing security plans for FDA submissions. Typical pay $140k.

Mid pay: solid pay, degree or apprenticeship

• Biomedical Engineer: Designs medical devices and technology, from pacemakers to prosthetics to diagnostic machines. Typical pay $107k.
• Clinical Engineer: Manages all the medical technology inside a hospital, from MRI machines to infusion pumps. Typical pay $95k.
• Quality Engineer (Medical Devices): Makes sure every device made is safe and works exactly as designed. Typical pay $95k.
• Regulatory Affairs Specialist: Prepares the paperwork and evidence needed to get medical products approved and keep them on the market. Typical pay $80k.
• Clinical Specialist (Medical Devices): A technical expert who supports doctors during procedures using their company's devices, like pacemakers and heart mapping systems. Typical pay $100k.
• Imaging Field Service Engineer: Travels to hospitals to install and repair million-dollar MRI, CT, and X-ray machines. Typical pay $85k.
• Biomedical Equipment Technician: Inspects, maintains, and repairs medical equipment inside hospitals. Typical pay $62k.
• Medical 3D Printing Specialist: Turns patients' CT and MRI scans into 3D-printed models and surgical guides. Typical pay $88k.
• Sterilization Engineer (Medical Devices): Designs and validates how medical devices are sterilized before reaching patients. Typical pay $95k.
• Mobile Surgical Laser Technician: Drives specialized surgical lasers and equipment to hospitals and surgery centers, sets them up and runs them during operations. Typical pay $60k.
• Medical Gas Systems Verifier: Tests the oxygen, vacuum and gas pipelines in hospitals to prove the right gas comes out of every wall outlet before patients use them. Typical pay $85k.

Starter: fastest way in

• Medical Device Assembler: Builds medical devices like catheters, stents, and surgical tools in clean-room factories. Typical pay $40k.
• Quality Control Inspector (Medical Devices): Checks medical devices for defects before they ship. Typical pay $46k.
• Home Medical Equipment Technician: Delivers and sets up hospital beds, oxygen, wheelchairs, and CPAP machines in patients' homes. Typical pay $40k.
• Dialysis Equipment Technician: Maintains dialysis machines and the ultra-pure water systems they depend on. Typical pay $54k.
• Complex Rehab Wheelchair Technician: Builds, customizes and repairs high-tech power wheelchairs for people with ALS, spinal cord injuries and cerebral palsy. 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.