AI/ML Engineer
Also known as: Machine Learning Engineer, ML Engineer, AI Engineer, Applied Scientist
Build and train machine learning models that power intelligent systems, from recommendation engines to autonomous vehicles.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for ai/ml engineers.
About 1 in 667 reaches this level
AI/ML engineers have no clean BLS code (est., no BLS code) — nearest proxy is ~276K data scientists (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 15-2051, 2025); only ~300-500 reach Distinguished AI/ML Scientist at $1.1M+ total comp at frontier labs.
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
Four years of tuition and required fees runs about $56K at a typical public college in our list (in-state) and about $288K at a typical private one. Both are pricier than the US national averages (about $48K public in-state, $180K private nonprofit, College Board 2025-26) because our 161-college dataset only includes nationally-ranked schools, not every US college. This excludes room and board, which we show separately on each college's page.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
AI/ML engineers build, train and run the machine-learning systems behind products like recommendation engines, chatbots and self-driving features. Demand for that work is growing fast. BLS has no separate category for this job. The closest one it tracks, computer and information research scientists, is projected to grow 22% from 2025 to 2035, much faster than the average for all jobs, and BLS names AI as a reason. That group is small, though: about 2,900 openings a year. Job postings point the same way. According to Indeed data reported by CIO, machine-learning skills were asked for in about 3% of job listings in 2024 and over 5% in 2025. And in a 2024 survey of employers for the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, AI and machine learning specialists were the third-fastest-growing job to 2030.
The risk sits inside the job. A large share of ML engineering is writing and fixing code: data pipelines, training scripts, deployment. That is the kind of work AI tools handle best. Anthropic's March 2026 study found computer programmers the most AI-exposed job it measured, with AI already used on tasks making up 75% of the job, and it found early signs that 22 to 25 year olds have become less likely to be hired into the most exposed jobs. So we keep this at 3, not 2. Demand for people who can design AI systems and judge whether they work is strong, but the junior, code-heavy way into the field is the same work that is getting harder to be hired for in software engineering. It sits below software engineering (4) because demand for AI skills is growing much faster than demand for software skills in general.
What would change this score. We have no hard numbers yet on entry-level ML hiring specifically, so this score leans on evidence from software engineering. If data shows junior ML roles holding up while AI coding tools spread, it should come down to 2. If companies start hiring fewer junior ML engineers per project, or the growth in AI job postings stalls, it goes to 4.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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