Industry index
Artificial Intelligence
Job descriptions for the AI ecosystem — research scientists, ML and LLM engineers, prompt and agent specialists, safety and governance leads, and the infrastructure, data, and product teams building modern AI systems. Each page covers daily work, required background (PhD-track research vs. applied engineering), salary ranges by level and specialty, and how the rapid shift from classical ML to foundation models has reshaped the job market in 2026.
All Artificial Intelligence roles
- AI Adoption Manager$105K–$175K
AI Adoption Managers lead the organizational and behavioral change required to move AI tools from pilot into daily workforce use. They sit at the intersection of technology, training, and change management — working with product teams, HR, and business unit leaders to design adoption programs, measure utilization, remove friction, and ensure that AI investments deliver the productivity gains they promised on the business case.
- AI Agent Developer$115K–$195K
AI Agent Developers design, build, and deploy autonomous AI systems that perceive inputs, reason over goals, and take actions — using large language models, tool-calling APIs, memory systems, and multi-agent orchestration frameworks. They sit at the intersection of applied ML engineering and software architecture, converting research capabilities into production-grade agents that operate reliably inside enterprise workflows, customer-facing products, and backend automation pipelines.
- AI Agent Engineer$130K–$210K
AI Agent Engineers design, build, and deploy autonomous AI systems — agents that plan, reason, use tools, and complete multi-step tasks with minimal human intervention. They sit at the intersection of software engineering and applied machine learning, turning large language models and supporting infrastructure into reliable, production-grade systems that act on behalf of users and enterprises across customer service, coding, research, and business automation workflows.
- AI Alignment Researcher$130K–$280K
AI Alignment Researchers work to ensure that increasingly powerful AI systems reliably pursue goals that are safe and beneficial to humanity. They develop formal frameworks, empirical experiments, and technical interventions — spanning interpretability, reward modeling, and scalable oversight — to understand how AI systems behave and why, and to make that behavior controllable and predictable before deployment at scale.
- AI Animator$65K–$120K
AI Animators combine generative AI tools with traditional animation craft to create characters, motion sequences, and visual effects for film, television, games, advertising, and interactive media. They use diffusion models, neural rendering pipelines, and AI-assisted rigging tools to accelerate production while maintaining artistic direction. The role sits at the intersection of technical fluency and storytelling instinct — understanding both how models work and why a pose reads as emotionally convincing.
- AI Auditor$95K–$160K
AI Auditors evaluate artificial intelligence systems for accuracy, fairness, safety, regulatory compliance, and alignment with stated business objectives. Working across financial services, healthcare, government, and technology sectors, they design and execute audit frameworks that surface model risk, data quality failures, and governance gaps before those problems cause regulatory violations or real-world harm.
- AI Automation Engineer$105K–$175K
AI Automation Engineers design, build, and deploy automated systems that use machine learning, large language models, and orchestration frameworks to replace or augment repetitive human workflows. They sit at the intersection of software engineering and applied AI — translating business processes into reliable, observable pipelines that run in production without constant human intervention. The role spans industries from financial services to healthcare to manufacturing, wherever structured and semi-structured work can be handed off to machines.
- AI Bias Auditor$95K–$160K
AI Bias Auditors evaluate machine learning models, training datasets, and automated decision systems for discriminatory patterns, disparate impacts, and fairness failures before and after deployment. They sit at the intersection of data science, ethics policy, and regulatory compliance — translating algorithmic behavior into findings that product teams, legal counsel, and executives can act on. Demand is accelerating as AI regulations in the EU, U.S., and other jurisdictions move from proposal to enforcement.
- AI Center of Excellence Lead$155K–$240K
An AI Center of Excellence Lead builds and operates the internal hub that standardizes how an enterprise adopts, governs, and scales artificial intelligence. They set AI strategy, define standards for model development and deployment, manage a cross-functional team of data scientists and ML engineers, and partner with business units to move AI pilots into production. The role sits at the intersection of technical leadership, organizational change management, and executive stakeholder engagement.
- AI Coach$72K–$130K
AI Coaches work directly with individuals, teams, and organizations to build practical fluency in artificial intelligence tools, workflows, and decision-making frameworks. They sit at the intersection of instructional design, change management, and applied AI — translating fast-moving technology into habits that measurably improve how people work. Unlike AI researchers or engineers, AI Coaches are focused on adoption: getting non-technical professionals to use AI effectively, confidently, and responsibly.
- AI Compliance Officer$105K–$185K
AI Compliance Officers are responsible for ensuring that an organization's artificial intelligence systems are developed, deployed, and monitored in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, internal policies, and ethical standards. They sit at the intersection of legal, technical, and business functions — translating regulatory requirements like the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, and sector-specific guidance into concrete governance programs that development and product teams can actually execute against.
- AI Content Strategist$75K–$135K
AI Content Strategists design and manage content programs that use generative AI tools to increase publishing volume, consistency, and search performance without sacrificing editorial quality. They sit at the intersection of content marketing, SEO, and AI operations — deciding which content types to automate, which workflows to build, which human editing steps remain essential, and how to measure the output. This is not a prompt-writing-only role; it requires genuine content strategy depth combined with hands-on fluency in large language model tools.
- AI Customer Success Manager$85K–$145K
AI Customer Success Managers own the post-sale relationship between an AI software vendor and its enterprise customers — driving adoption, preventing churn, and demonstrating measurable ROI from machine learning and generative AI products. They sit at the intersection of business outcomes and technical implementation, translating model behavior and platform capabilities into language that procurement teams, data scientists, and C-suite sponsors all find credible. Success in this role requires genuine fluency with AI concepts alongside the commercial instincts of an account manager.
- AI Data Curator$72K–$130K
AI Data Curators source, clean, label, and maintain the datasets that machine learning models train on. They sit at the intersection of data engineering and research operations — ensuring that the inputs feeding a model are accurate, representative, consistently formatted, and free from the quality problems that silently corrupt model behavior. This role is foundational to any serious ML pipeline and has grown substantially as the scale of training data requirements has increased.
- AI Data Engineer$105K–$175K
AI Data Engineers design, build, and maintain the data infrastructure that powers machine learning systems — pipelines, feature stores, data lakes, and real-time streaming architectures that feed model training and inference at scale. They sit at the intersection of data engineering and MLOps, translating raw, messy data sources into clean, versioned, and observable datasets that data scientists and ML engineers can actually use in production.
- AI Data Quality Engineer$95K–$160K
AI Data Quality Engineers design, implement, and maintain the validation frameworks, pipelines, and monitoring systems that ensure training data, inference inputs, and ground-truth labels meet the standards ML models require to perform reliably. They sit at the intersection of data engineering and ML operations, owning the processes that catch label errors, schema drift, distribution shift, and upstream data corruption before those problems propagate into model behavior or production predictions.
- AI Engineering Manager$175K–$280K
AI Engineering Managers lead the teams that design, build, and deploy machine learning systems, large language model applications, and AI-powered products in production. They sit at the intersection of engineering leadership and applied research — setting technical direction, managing engineers and researchers, owning delivery commitments, and translating business goals into model and infrastructure roadmaps. The role demands both hands-on technical depth and the organizational skills to run a high-output engineering organization.
- AI Ethics Researcher$95K–$165K
AI Ethics Researchers study the societal, philosophical, and technical dimensions of artificial intelligence systems to ensure they are developed and deployed responsibly. They identify potential harms — bias, discrimination, privacy erosion, misuse — develop frameworks and guidelines to mitigate those harms, and work across engineering, policy, and legal teams to embed ethical considerations into the full AI development lifecycle. The role sits at the intersection of computer science, moral philosophy, social science, and public policy.
- AI Governance Specialist$95K–$155K
AI Governance Specialists design, implement, and maintain the policies, risk frameworks, and oversight mechanisms that keep artificial intelligence systems compliant, fair, and accountable inside organizations. They sit at the intersection of legal, technical, and operational teams — translating regulatory requirements like the EU AI Act and NIST AI RMF into internal controls that practitioners can actually follow. The role is growing rapidly as governments regulate AI and enterprises face reputational and legal exposure from model failures.
- AI Hardware Engineer$130K–$230K
AI Hardware Engineers design, develop, and optimize the silicon and systems that run machine learning workloads — from custom accelerators and GPUs to memory subsystems and inference chips. They sit at the intersection of computer architecture, digital design, and ML systems, ensuring that the hardware layer keeps pace with rapidly scaling model sizes and throughput demands. The role spans concept through tape-out and production deployment at chipmakers, hyperscalers, and AI-native startups.
- AI Implementation Consultant$95K–$175K
AI Implementation Consultants guide organizations through the technical and operational process of deploying artificial intelligence systems — from scoping use cases and selecting platforms to integrating models into existing workflows and measuring business outcomes. They sit at the intersection of data science, software engineering, change management, and industry-specific domain knowledge, translating executive-level AI ambitions into working production systems that deliver measurable results.
- AI Infrastructure Engineer$135K–$220K
AI Infrastructure Engineers design, build, and operate the computational foundation that makes large-scale machine learning possible — GPU clusters, distributed training frameworks, model serving pipelines, and the storage and networking architecture that ties them together. They sit at the intersection of systems engineering and ML operations, ensuring that data scientists and ML engineers have reliable, high-throughput infrastructure to train, evaluate, and deploy models without hitting hardware or software ceilings.
- AI Integration Specialist$95K–$155K
AI Integration Specialists design, implement, and maintain the technical bridges between an organization's existing software infrastructure and AI/ML services, APIs, and models. They work at the intersection of software engineering, data architecture, and machine learning operations — translating business requirements into working AI-powered features while ensuring reliability, security, and scalability across production systems.
- AI Operations Manager$115K–$185K
AI Operations Managers oversee the deployment, monitoring, and continuous reliability of machine learning models and AI systems running in production. They bridge the gap between data science teams who build models and engineering teams who maintain infrastructure, ensuring AI systems perform accurately, scale predictably, and comply with governance requirements. The role owns the operational health of an organization's AI portfolio from initial deployment through deprecation.
- AI Performance Engineer$130K–$220K
AI Performance Engineers optimize the speed, throughput, and resource efficiency of machine learning models from training to production inference. They sit at the intersection of systems engineering, hardware architecture, and ML research — profiling where compute is wasted, redesigning pipelines to eliminate bottlenecks, and making large models fast enough to serve millions of requests at acceptable cost. The role has become critical as enterprises discover that a model that runs in the lab rarely runs economically at scale.
- AI Policy Analyst$78K–$135K
AI Policy Analysts research, develop, and communicate policy positions on artificial intelligence regulation, ethics, and governance — advising technology companies, government agencies, think tanks, and advocacy organizations on how AI systems should be built, deployed, and overseen. They sit at the intersection of technical understanding and public policy, translating complex AI capabilities and risks into frameworks legislators, regulators, and executives can act on.
- AI Privacy Engineer$125K–$210K
AI Privacy Engineers design and implement technical safeguards that protect personal data throughout the machine learning lifecycle — from data ingestion and model training to inference and deployment. They sit at the intersection of privacy law, cryptography, and ML engineering, translating regulatory requirements like GDPR and CCPA into code, architectural patterns, and governance controls that let organizations build AI systems without exposing sensitive information.
- AI Product Designer$95K–$165K
AI Product Designers create user-facing experiences for AI-powered products — defining how people interact with machine learning features, generative outputs, conversational interfaces, and intelligent automation. They sit at the intersection of UX design, product thinking, and AI system behavior, translating model capabilities and limitations into interfaces that users can trust and actually use. The role demands both deep design craft and enough AI literacy to collaborate fluently with engineers and data scientists.
- AI Product Manager$125K–$210K
AI Product Managers own the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of AI-powered products — from large language model integrations to computer vision systems to recommendation engines. They sit at the intersection of machine learning research, engineering, and business, translating ambiguous user problems into concrete model requirements, defining success metrics for probabilistic systems, and shepherding features from prototype to production at scale.
- AI Red Team Engineer$115K–$195K
AI Red Team Engineers systematically attack machine learning systems, large language models, and AI-powered products to find safety failures, exploitable behaviors, and alignment gaps before adversaries or end users do. They design adversarial test suites, execute jailbreaking and prompt injection campaigns, evaluate model outputs for harmful content, and work directly with safety and model teams to harden deployments against real-world misuse.
- AI Research Scientist$145K–$280K
AI Research Scientists design, develop, and evaluate novel machine learning methods — from foundational model architectures to reinforcement learning algorithms and multimodal systems. They sit at the boundary between academic research and production engineering, publishing findings, prototyping techniques, and translating breakthroughs into systems that reach users at scale. The role demands both theoretical depth in mathematics and statistics and the engineering discipline to run reproducible experiments on large compute clusters.
- AI Risk Manager$115K–$195K
AI Risk Managers identify, assess, and mitigate the risks that emerge when organizations deploy machine learning models and automated decision systems at scale. They sit at the intersection of data science, regulatory compliance, and enterprise risk management — building the frameworks, controls, and monitoring programs that keep AI systems from causing financial, reputational, or legal harm. The role is increasingly common in financial services, healthcare, and technology, but is expanding across every sector that deploys consequential AI.
- AI Safety Engineer$130K–$210K
AI Safety Engineers design, implement, and evaluate technical safeguards that prevent AI systems from behaving in unintended, harmful, or deceptive ways. They work at the intersection of machine learning engineering and alignment research — building red-teaming frameworks, interpretability tools, and deployment guardrails that make large-scale AI systems trustworthy enough to ship. The role sits at frontier AI labs, government agencies, and enterprise organizations deploying high-stakes AI.
- AI Safety Researcher$130K–$220K
AI Safety Researchers study the technical and theoretical problems that arise when training, deploying, and scaling advanced AI systems — with the goal of ensuring those systems behave as intended, remain interpretable, and do not produce catastrophic or unintended outcomes. They work at the intersection of machine learning, formal verification, decision theory, and empirical experimentation, producing research that informs how frontier models are built and governed.
- AI Sales Engineer$105K–$195K
AI Sales Engineers bridge the gap between enterprise AI platforms and the technical buyers who evaluate them. Working alongside account executives, they run product demonstrations, architect proof-of-concept deployments, answer deep integration questions, and translate complex machine learning capabilities into measurable business outcomes. The role sits at the intersection of data science literacy, solution architecture, and commercial persuasion — and the market for people who can do all three is highly competitive.
- AI Software Engineer$115K–$210K
AI Software Engineers design, build, and deploy the software infrastructure that turns machine learning research into production systems. They sit at the intersection of traditional software engineering and applied machine learning — writing the data pipelines, model serving layers, APIs, and monitoring infrastructure that make AI systems reliable, scalable, and actually useful in the real world. Most roles require fluency in both software engineering best practices and at least one area of ML depth.
- AI Solutions Architect$145K–$230K
AI Solutions Architects design and oversee the end-to-end technical architecture for artificial intelligence systems — translating business problems into scalable ML pipelines, model serving infrastructure, and data integration patterns. They work at the boundary between data science, software engineering, and executive stakeholders, making the judgment calls that determine whether an AI initiative ships and holds up in production. The role sits above individual model development but below pure strategy; the job is to build things that work at enterprise scale.
- AI Solutions Engineer$115K–$195K
AI Solutions Engineers bridge the gap between cutting-edge machine learning research and production-grade customer deployments. They work alongside sales, product, and data science teams to scope AI use cases, design integration architectures, build proof-of-concept demos, and guide enterprise customers through implementation. The role demands both deep technical fluency in ML frameworks and APIs and the communication skills to translate model behavior into business outcomes for non-technical stakeholders.
- AI Strategy Consultant$115K–$210K
AI Strategy Consultants advise organizations on how to identify, prioritize, and execute artificial intelligence initiatives that generate measurable business value. They sit at the intersection of technology and business, translating executive goals into AI roadmaps, evaluating build-vs-buy tradeoffs, and guiding clients through the organizational changes required to operate AI-powered systems at scale. Most roles span strategy development, vendor selection, and program governance across industries including financial services, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing.
- AI Systems Engineer$115K–$195K
AI Systems Engineers design, build, and operate the infrastructure that takes machine learning models from research notebooks into reliable production systems. They sit at the intersection of software engineering, distributed systems, and MLOps — responsible for model serving pipelines, training infrastructure, feature stores, and the observability tooling that keeps AI systems running at the quality and scale the business depends on.
- AI Trading Algorithm Developer$120K–$220K
AI Trading Algorithm Developers design, build, and deploy machine learning models and quantitative strategies that execute trades autonomously across equities, futures, options, FX, and crypto markets. They sit at the intersection of data science, financial engineering, and low-latency software development — responsible for turning statistical edge into live P&L. The role demands equal fluency in ML methodology, market microstructure, and production-grade engineering.
- AI Trainer$52K–$95K
AI Trainers design, evaluate, and refine the training data, prompts, and feedback signals that teach machine learning models how to respond correctly. Working at the intersection of linguistics, domain expertise, and data quality, they rate model outputs, write prompt-response pairs, flag harmful content, and run systematic evaluations that directly shape how AI systems behave in production.
- AI Transformation Lead$135K–$220K
An AI Transformation Lead drives the strategic adoption of artificial intelligence across an organization — translating executive vision into funded roadmaps, change management programs, and measurable business outcomes. They sit at the intersection of data science, operations, and executive leadership, identifying where AI creates the most value, securing stakeholder alignment, and ensuring deployments move from pilot to production without stalling. The role demands both technical fluency and the organizational credibility to push change through resistant structures.
- AI Trust and Safety Specialist$78K–$135K
AI Trust and Safety Specialists design, implement, and monitor the policies and technical systems that prevent AI models from producing harmful, misleading, or policy-violating outputs. They sit at the intersection of content policy, machine learning, and risk management — evaluating model behavior, writing safety guidelines, and working with engineering teams to catch failure modes before they reach end users or make headlines.
- AI Workflow Designer$95K–$155K
AI Workflow Designers architect and build the automated pipelines that connect large language models, APIs, data sources, and human review steps into coherent business processes. They sit at the intersection of process engineering, prompt design, and systems integration — translating business requirements into working AI-augmented workflows that reduce manual effort, enforce quality gates, and scale across teams. The role exists in the gap between AI capability and operational reality.
- Autonomous Vehicles AI Engineer$130K–$220K
Autonomous Vehicles AI Engineers design, train, and deploy the perception, prediction, and planning systems that allow self-driving cars and advanced driver-assistance systems to interpret sensor data and make real-time decisions. They work at the intersection of machine learning, robotics, and embedded systems — building models that must perform reliably at highway speeds with lives depending on the output. The role spans from research-grade model development through production deployment on automotive-grade hardware.
- Chief AI Officer$220K–$450K
A Chief AI Officer (CAIO) is the senior executive responsible for defining and executing an organization's artificial intelligence strategy — from model deployment and data infrastructure to governance, ethics, and ROI accountability. They sit at the intersection of technology and business leadership, translating AI capabilities into competitive advantage while managing risk, regulatory exposure, and organizational change at an enterprise scale.
- Computer Vision Engineer$115K–$195K
Computer Vision Engineers design, train, and deploy machine learning systems that interpret and act on visual data — images, video, point clouds, and sensor feeds. They work across the full pipeline from raw data acquisition through model architecture, training, optimization, and production inference. Their output powers autonomous vehicles, industrial inspection, medical imaging, retail analytics, and augmented reality applications.
- Computer Vision Researcher$115K–$210K
Computer Vision Researchers design, train, and evaluate machine learning models that interpret visual data — images, video, point clouds, and sensor streams — for applications ranging from autonomous vehicles and medical imaging to robotics and augmented reality. They sit at the intersection of fundamental research and applied engineering, publishing novel methods while simultaneously pushing those methods into production systems that generate commercial value.
- Conversational AI Designer$85K–$145K
Conversational AI Designers architect the dialogue flows, intent taxonomies, and personality frameworks that make chatbots, virtual assistants, and voice interfaces actually useful to real users. They sit at the intersection of linguistics, UX, and machine learning — translating business requirements into conversation designs that NLP models can execute and that humans don't abandon in frustration. The role exists wherever companies are deploying language-based AI products, from customer service automation to enterprise copilots.
- CUDA Engineer$135K–$220K
CUDA Engineers design and optimize GPU-accelerated software for deep learning training, inference, scientific computing, and high-performance simulation. They write kernels in CUDA C/C++, profile and tune memory access patterns, and work across the full stack from hardware architecture to framework integration. The role sits at the intersection of computer architecture, numerical algorithms, and systems programming, and commands some of the highest compensation in software engineering.
- Data Labeling Specialist$34K–$72K
Data Labeling Specialists annotate raw data — images, audio, video, text, and sensor streams — so that machine learning models have the correctly labeled examples they need to train, evaluate, and improve. Working within annotation platforms and following detailed labeling guidelines, they classify objects, transcribe speech, draw bounding boxes, segment scenes, and flag ambiguous or policy-violating content. Their output quality directly determines how well AI systems perform in production.
- Deep Learning Engineer$135K–$220K
Deep Learning Engineers design, train, and deploy neural network models that power computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and generative AI systems. They sit at the intersection of research and production — translating algorithmic ideas into systems that run reliably at scale. The role requires fluency in both the mathematics of modern neural architectures and the engineering discipline needed to ship models into production environments.
- Director of AI Strategy$175K–$280K
Directors of AI Strategy sit at the intersection of business leadership and technical execution, responsible for defining how an organization uses artificial intelligence to create competitive advantage, reduce cost, or open new markets. They translate C-suite ambitions into funded roadmaps, govern the portfolio of AI initiatives, and work across product, engineering, legal, and finance to ensure AI investments deliver measurable returns. The role demands both a fluent grasp of what AI systems can actually do today and the organizational influence to get cross-functional teams moving in the same direction.
- Distributed Training Engineer$155K–$280K
Distributed Training Engineers design, implement, and optimize the systems that train large-scale machine learning models across hundreds or thousands of accelerators. They sit at the intersection of ML research and systems engineering — responsible for parallelism strategies, communication collectives, cluster scheduling, and fault tolerance — so that model training runs complete efficiently without wasting millions of dollars of GPU-hours. The role exists wherever serious model development happens: at frontier AI labs, large cloud providers, and enterprises with substantial ML ambitions.
- Edge AI Engineer$115K–$185K
Edge AI Engineers design, optimize, and deploy machine learning models on resource-constrained hardware — microcontrollers, FPGAs, mobile SoCs, and purpose-built AI accelerators — where cloud round-trips are too slow, too expensive, or simply unavailable. They sit at the intersection of deep learning, embedded systems engineering, and hardware-aware software design, translating research models into production firmware that runs inference in milliseconds on milliwatts.
- Embedded AI Engineer$105K–$175K
Embedded AI Engineers design, optimize, and deploy machine learning models on microcontrollers, DSPs, FPGAs, and edge SoCs where compute, memory, and power budgets are measured in milliwatts and kilobytes. They sit at the intersection of firmware development, hardware architecture, and neural network optimization — converting models that run fine in the cloud into inference engines that must run reliably on a chip the size of a fingernail. The role spans everything from model compression and quantization to writing bare-metal inference kernels and integrating sensor pipelines.
- Financial Services AI Engineer$125K–$210K
Financial Services AI Engineers design, build, and deploy machine learning and AI systems inside banks, asset managers, insurance companies, and fintech firms. They work at the intersection of quantitative finance and production ML engineering — building credit scoring models, fraud detection pipelines, algorithmic trading signals, and regulatory compliance tools that must meet both performance standards and strict regulatory requirements around explainability, fairness, and auditability.
- Fine-tuning Engineer$115K–$195K
Fine-tuning Engineers specialize in adapting pre-trained large language models and other foundation models to specific tasks, domains, or behavioral requirements. They design and execute supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and parameter-efficient adaptation techniques — translating raw model capability into production-ready, domain-specific AI systems that meet latency, accuracy, and safety constraints.
- Foundation Model Researcher$175K–$340K
Foundation Model Researchers design, train, and evaluate large-scale neural networks — language models, multimodal systems, and related architectures — that serve as the base layer for downstream AI applications. They sit at the intersection of theoretical machine learning and large-scale systems engineering, advancing capabilities in areas like reasoning, alignment, and generalization while publishing findings that push the field forward. This role exists at a small number of well-resourced labs and leading tech companies willing to fund compute at the frontier.
- Generative AI Designer$95K–$165K
Generative AI Designers bridge design craft and machine learning capability — building interfaces, workflows, and visual outputs that use generative AI models as core creative tools. They work at the intersection of UX, prompt engineering, and model behavior, shaping how products look, feel, and communicate when the underlying content is produced by AI. The role spans enterprise software, consumer apps, creative platforms, and AI-native startups, and it is one of the fastest-moving specializations in the design profession.
- Generative AI Engineer$135K–$230K
Generative AI Engineers design, build, and deploy large language model (LLM) applications and multimodal AI systems that produce text, images, code, audio, or structured data at scale. They bridge the gap between raw foundation models — GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, Llama — and production-grade software that real users interact with, handling everything from prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation to fine-tuning, evaluation frameworks, and inference optimization.
- GPU Infrastructure Engineer$145K–$230K
GPU Infrastructure Engineers design, deploy, and operate the large-scale compute clusters that train and serve AI models. They sit at the intersection of hardware provisioning, systems software, and high-performance networking — responsible for keeping thousands of GPUs running at high utilization while minimizing the mean time to recovery when nodes fail. The role exists anywhere that model scale matters: hyperscalers, AI labs, and large enterprises building internal ML platforms.
- Head of AI$185K–$320K
The Head of AI is the senior executive or director responsible for defining, building, and delivering an organization's artificial intelligence strategy across products, operations, and infrastructure. This role bridges the gap between business leadership and machine learning engineering — translating board-level ambitions into funded roadmaps, production systems, and measurable outcomes. The person in this seat owns the AI team, the model governance framework, the build-vs-buy decisions, and ultimately the accountability when AI initiatives succeed or fail.
- Healthcare AI Engineer$115K–$195K
Healthcare AI Engineers design, build, and deploy machine learning systems that operate within clinical and administrative healthcare environments — from diagnostic imaging models to clinical decision support tools and NLP pipelines on electronic health records. They sit at the intersection of software engineering, data science, and healthcare regulatory compliance, translating raw clinical data into production-grade AI that meets FDA, HIPAA, and institutional safety requirements.
- Image Generation Engineer$115K–$195K
Image Generation Engineers design, train, and deploy machine learning models that produce synthetic images from text prompts, reference images, or structured data. They work at the intersection of computer vision, generative modeling, and production ML systems, building the pipelines that power creative tools, product visualization, medical imaging, and synthetic data generation. The role demands both deep research fluency and the engineering discipline to ship models at scale.
- Inference Engineer$145K–$240K
Inference Engineers design, optimize, and maintain the systems that serve trained machine learning models to production users at scale. They sit at the intersection of ML engineering and systems engineering — responsible for throughput, latency, cost-per-query, and reliability once a model leaves the research environment. Their work determines whether a language model, vision system, or recommendation engine actually delivers value in the real world.
- Legal AI Specialist$95K–$165K
Legal AI Specialists sit at the intersection of law and machine learning, designing, deploying, and evaluating AI-powered tools used in contract analysis, legal research, litigation support, and compliance automation. They combine domain knowledge of legal processes with technical fluency in NLP models, prompt engineering, and legal data pipelines to make AI systems actually useful inside law firms, corporate legal departments, and legal technology companies.
- LLM Application Engineer$115K–$195K
LLM Application Engineers design, build, and deploy software systems that integrate large language models into real-world products — from customer-facing chatbots and enterprise copilots to internal automation pipelines. They sit at the intersection of software engineering and applied AI, responsible for prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation architecture, API integration, evaluation frameworks, and the operational reliability of LLM-powered features in production.
- LLM Engineer$135K–$220K
LLM Engineers design, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy large language models into production systems that power chatbots, copilots, document processing pipelines, and autonomous agents. They sit between research and software engineering — translating model capabilities into reliable, cost-efficient product features while managing inference infrastructure, prompt engineering, and evaluation frameworks at scale.
- LLM Evaluation Engineer$115K–$195K
LLM Evaluation Engineers design, build, and maintain the systems that measure whether large language models actually work — covering accuracy, safety, alignment, factuality, and task-specific performance. They sit at the intersection of ML engineering, behavioral testing, and red-teaming, translating fuzzy notions of 'model quality' into reproducible metrics that drive training and deployment decisions at AI labs and AI-forward product companies.
- LLM Safety Engineer$145K–$230K
LLM Safety Engineers design, implement, and validate the technical safeguards that keep large language models from producing harmful, deceptive, or policy-violating outputs at scale. Working at the intersection of ML engineering, adversarial research, and policy, they build evaluation pipelines, run red-team exercises, and harden model behavior across training, fine-tuning, and deployment — ensuring that production AI systems behave as intended even under adversarial conditions.
- Machine Learning Engineer$115K–$210K
Machine Learning Engineers design, build, and deploy machine learning systems that move from research prototype to production infrastructure. They sit at the intersection of software engineering and data science — writing the pipelines, training infrastructure, model serving layers, and monitoring systems that keep ML models running reliably at scale. Unlike data scientists who focus on experimentation, ML Engineers own the production systems that make models usable by real applications and users.
- Machine Learning Research Scientist$140K–$250K
Machine Learning Research Scientists design, develop, and experimentally validate novel algorithms, architectures, and training methodologies that push the boundaries of what AI systems can do. They operate at the intersection of theoretical mathematics and applied engineering — publishing findings, influencing product direction, and building the foundational capabilities that downstream ML engineers eventually deploy at scale. Most positions are concentrated at AI research labs, large technology companies, and well-funded startups.
- Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher$145K–$280K
Mechanistic Interpretability Researchers investigate the internal computations of neural networks — particularly large language models and transformer architectures — to understand how specific behaviors, representations, and failure modes emerge from model weights and circuits. They sit at the intersection of empirical machine learning and safety research, using techniques like activation patching, probing classifiers, and sparse autoencoder decomposition to reverse-engineer what trained models are actually doing, not just what they output.
- ML Compiler Engineer$155K–$260K
ML Compiler Engineers build the software stack that translates high-level neural network graphs into optimized machine code for GPUs, TPUs, and custom AI accelerators. They sit at the intersection of compiler theory, machine learning frameworks, and computer architecture — writing passes that fuse operations, tile loops, manage memory layout, and schedule instructions to squeeze maximum throughput from silicon. Demand spans chip startups, hyperscalers, and ML framework teams at every major AI company.
- ML Data Engineer$105K–$175K
ML Data Engineers design, build, and maintain the data pipelines, feature stores, and infrastructure that make machine learning models trainable, deployable, and trustworthy in production. Sitting at the intersection of data engineering and ML systems, they work closely with data scientists and ML engineers to ensure that the right data — clean, versioned, and at the right scale — reaches training and inference systems reliably. Their work is less about building models and more about making sure models can be built and run without breaking.
- ML Infrastructure Engineer$145K–$230K
ML Infrastructure Engineers design, build, and operate the computational systems that enable machine learning at scale — GPU clusters, distributed training pipelines, model serving platforms, and the data infrastructure that feeds them. They sit at the intersection of systems engineering and machine learning, translating research requirements into production-grade infrastructure that can train foundation models, serve billions of inferences per day, and maintain reliability under rapidly shifting workloads.
- ML Platform Engineer$130K–$210K
ML Platform Engineers design, build, and operate the infrastructure that lets data scientists and ML engineers train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor machine learning models at scale. They sit at the intersection of software engineering, distributed systems, and applied ML — owning the pipelines, compute orchestration, feature stores, and serving layers that turn research models into production systems. The role has emerged as one of the most in-demand engineering specializations in the AI industry.
- MLOps Engineer$115K–$195K
MLOps Engineers build and operate the infrastructure, pipelines, and tooling that carry machine learning models from research notebooks into production systems — and keep them running reliably at scale. They sit at the intersection of software engineering, data engineering, and ML research, owning the deployment lifecycle, monitoring frameworks, and CI/CD automation that turn experimental models into business-critical services.
- Model Serving Engineer$135K–$210K
Model Serving Engineers design, build, and operate the infrastructure that delivers machine learning model predictions to production applications at scale. Sitting at the intersection of ML engineering and systems engineering, they own the runtime systems — inference servers, model registries, latency optimization pipelines, and hardware allocation — that turn a trained model into a reliable API endpoint handling millions of requests per day. Their work directly determines whether a model that performs brilliantly in a notebook ever reaches end users at acceptable speed and cost.
- Multi-Agent Systems Engineer$130K–$210K
Multi-Agent Systems Engineers design, build, and operate networks of autonomous AI agents that collaborate to complete complex, multi-step tasks — from research and data extraction to code generation and business process automation. They sit at the intersection of distributed systems engineering and applied ML, responsible for agent orchestration, inter-agent communication protocols, reliability under production load, and the guardrails that keep autonomous pipelines from going off the rails.
- Music AI Engineer$105K–$185K
Music AI Engineers design, train, and deploy machine learning systems that generate, analyze, transform, and understand music and audio signals. Working at the intersection of deep learning research and production audio engineering, they build the models behind AI composition tools, stem separation systems, music recommendation engines, and real-time audio processing pipelines. The role requires both strong ML fundamentals and genuine fluency in music theory, signal processing, and audio codec standards.
- NLP Engineer$105K–$185K
NLP Engineers design, build, and deploy systems that enable machines to process, understand, and generate human language — from search and sentiment analysis to conversational AI and document intelligence. They sit at the intersection of machine learning engineering and computational linguistics, taking language models from research prototype to production-grade systems that handle millions of queries at scale.
- NLP Researcher$130K–$220K
NLP Researchers design, train, and evaluate language models and natural language processing systems — ranging from core model architecture work to applied tasks like machine translation, question answering, information extraction, and dialogue. They operate at the intersection of deep learning and linguistics, publishing findings, building benchmarks, and translating research into production systems at AI labs, tech companies, and universities.
- Principal Machine Learning Engineer$185K–$310K
Principal Machine Learning Engineers are the senior individual contributors who design and ship the most technically demanding ML systems at scale — foundation model fine-tuning pipelines, real-time inference infrastructure, recommendation engines handling billions of requests per day, and multi-modal AI products. They set the technical direction for ML platforms, mentor staff engineers, and own decisions that determine whether a model ever reaches production in a form that actually works. The role sits at the intersection of applied research and production engineering, and demands deep competency in both.
- Prompt Engineer$95K–$175K
Prompt Engineers design, test, and refine the instructions and context structures that guide large language models (LLMs) to produce accurate, useful, and safe outputs. They sit at the intersection of NLP, software engineering, and domain expertise — translating product requirements into prompt architectures that perform reliably at scale. The role exists across AI labs, enterprise software teams, and consulting firms deploying generative AI to automate knowledge work.
- RAG Engineer$115K–$185K
RAG Engineers design, build, and maintain Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems that ground large language model outputs in verified, domain-specific knowledge. They sit at the intersection of information retrieval, embeddings research, and production ML engineering — responsible for everything from chunking strategy and vector index selection to latency optimization and hallucination measurement in systems that real users depend on every day.
- Recommendation Systems Engineer$115K–$195K
Recommendation Systems Engineers design, build, and maintain the machine learning systems that surface personalized content, products, and experiences to users at scale. They work at the intersection of ML modeling, large-scale data infrastructure, and real-time serving, translating user behavior signals into ranking and retrieval systems that directly drive engagement and revenue. The role spans algorithm design, feature engineering, A/B testing, and production deployment across platforms handling millions of requests per second.
- Reinforcement Learning Researcher$145K–$280K
Reinforcement Learning Researchers design, implement, and evaluate algorithms that train agents to make sequential decisions by interacting with environments — from game simulators to robotics hardware to language model fine-tuning pipelines. They sit at the intersection of theoretical ML research and applied engineering, publishing findings and shipping systems that push the frontier of what learned policies can do in production.
- Responsible AI Lead$145K–$230K
A Responsible AI Lead develops and enforces the principles, policies, and technical safeguards that keep an organization's AI systems fair, transparent, and legally compliant. Working at the intersection of machine learning engineering, legal risk, and product strategy, they translate abstract ethics commitments into concrete model governance processes — bias audits, explainability requirements, incident response protocols — and ensure those processes hold under commercial pressure.
- RLHF Annotation Specialist$45K–$85K
RLHF Annotation Specialists evaluate, rank, and label AI-generated text, code, images, or other outputs to train large language models using reinforcement learning from human feedback. They sit at the intersection of linguistics, subject-matter expertise, and AI model development — their judgments directly shape how models like GPT-class systems learn to respond, reason, and refuse. The role ranges from part-time contractor work on crowdsourcing platforms to full-time positions embedded in AI safety and fine-tuning teams at major labs.
- Robotics AI Engineer$105K–$185K
Robotics AI Engineers design and implement the algorithms, software stacks, and machine learning models that enable physical robots to perceive their environment, make decisions, and execute tasks autonomously. They sit at the intersection of classical robotics engineering and modern AI — combining control theory, computer vision, and deep learning to build systems that operate reliably in the real world. Employers include autonomous vehicle companies, industrial automation firms, surgical robotics vendors, and defense contractors.
- Senior Machine Learning Engineer$155K–$240K
Senior Machine Learning Engineers design, build, and operate the end-to-end systems that take ML models from research prototypes into production services running at scale. They sit at the intersection of applied research and software engineering — deep enough in mathematics to evaluate model architectures, experienced enough in distributed systems to own the infrastructure that serves predictions to millions of users. Most teams consider this role the technical backbone of any serious AI product organization.
- Senior Prompt Engineer$130K–$195K
Senior Prompt Engineers design, test, and optimize the instruction systems that govern how large language models behave across enterprise products and internal tools. They sit at the intersection of linguistics, software engineering, and ML systems — writing structured prompts, building evaluation pipelines, and translating business requirements into LLM behavior that is reliable enough to ship to production. At senior level, they own the prompt architecture for entire products, not just individual queries.
- Speech Recognition Engineer$105K–$185K
Speech Recognition Engineers design, train, and deploy automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems that convert spoken language into text or structured commands. They work across the full stack — from acoustic feature extraction and language model training to real-time inference optimization and production deployment. Their systems power voice assistants, transcription services, call center automation, accessibility tools, and conversational AI products used by millions of people daily.
- Staff Machine Learning Engineer$195K–$310K
Staff Machine Learning Engineers design, build, and operationalize large-scale machine learning systems that move from research prototype to production infrastructure. Operating above senior level, they lead technical direction across multiple teams, establish modeling standards, and own the full ML lifecycle — from feature engineering and model architecture through training pipelines, serving infrastructure, and monitoring. Their work shapes how an organization's AI capabilities are built and sustained.
- Synthetic Data Engineer$105K–$175K
Synthetic Data Engineers design, build, and maintain pipelines that generate artificial datasets used to train, evaluate, and audit machine learning models. They combine domain knowledge with generative modeling, simulation, and privacy-preserving techniques to produce data that is statistically realistic, structurally valid, and free from the legal and ethical constraints that limit real-world data collection. The role sits at the intersection of data engineering, ML research, and regulatory compliance.
- Video Generation Engineer$115K–$210K
Video Generation Engineers design, train, and deploy machine learning systems that produce synthetic video from text prompts, images, or other conditioning signals. Working at the intersection of computer vision, generative modeling, and large-scale distributed training, they build the model architectures and inference pipelines behind commercial video synthesis products. The role sits inside AI research teams, product-facing ML engineering groups, or both.
- Voice AI Engineer$105K–$195K
Voice AI Engineers design, build, and optimize the speech and language systems that power voice assistants, call-center automation, accessibility tools, and multimodal AI products. They work across the full voice stack — automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), natural language understanding (NLU), and dialogue management — turning raw audio into responsive, human-sounding interactions that perform reliably under real-world noise and accent diversity.
- VP of AI$210K–$380K
A VP of AI is the senior executive responsible for defining and executing an organization's artificial intelligence strategy — from applied machine learning and generative AI initiatives to data infrastructure and responsible AI governance. This person bridges technical depth and business leadership, translating AI capabilities into revenue, cost, and competitive advantage. They typically own a cross-functional team of ML engineers, data scientists, AI researchers, and product managers, and report to a CTO, CPO, or CEO.