What Is a AI Engineer?

• Design prompts, retrieval (RAG), and agent/tool-use workflows
• Integrate foundation-model APIs into product features
• Build evaluation harnesses for LLM output quality and safety
• Manage latency, cost, and reliability of model-backed features
• Iterate quickly on model and prompt versions with real usage data

Based on 63 AI Engineer postings in our database that disclose a salary, the range runs from $94,456 to $280,000, with a median of $196,000. These are aggregate figures across disclosing postings only — individual offers vary by company, stage, and location.