Prompt Engineer

Also known as: AI Prompt Engineer, LLM Engineer, AI Interaction Designer

Technology & AIBachelor's DegreeUncertain

Craft and optimize prompts for large language models to get the best outputs for specific business use cases.

Salary Range

Entry Level

$75K

Starting salary

→

Top Level

$350K

Top salary

Director of AI Engineering

The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for prompt engineers.

About 1 in 50 reaches this level

New and small field with no BLS code (est., no BLS code) — roughly 30-50K practitioners; Director of AI Engineering at $350K total comp is uncommon, though the field skews senior: perhaps 500-1,000 such posts exist, about one at each large company building AI products (est.) — about 2%.

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:

MITComputer Science

StanfordComputer Science

CMUComputer Science

UC BerkeleyComputer Science

Georgia TechComputer Science

Explore all colleges →

Cost to Qualify

Bachelor's degree (4 years)

4 years after school

$56,454

Tuition and required fees. Living costs are not included

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.

↗College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025 (PDF) - 2025-26 average published tuition and fees: public four-year in-state $11,950, private nonprofit four-year $45,000 (the national averages our note quotes as about $48K and $180K over four years)

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

Critical Risk (Level 5/5)How we score ›

The most AI-vulnerable role on this entire list. Fortune reported the role is "already obsolete" as models improve at understanding imprecise instructions, handling chain-of-thought reasoning, self-correction, and instruction-following natively. Companies are integrating prompt skills into existing roles rather than hiring specialists. This role may largely cease to exist as a distinct profession within 2-3 years.