Applied AI Engineer
Applied AI Engineers design and ship AI-powered features within their company's product, applying large language models, retrieval systems, and agentic workflows to solve specific product problems. They work end-to-end across backend services, APIs, and user-facing interfaces, taking responsibility for building reliable systems that combine model selection, prompt engineering, tool use, and evaluation frameworks. These engineers typically sit within product or platform teams at AI-native companies, collaborating closely with product managers and research teams to translate user workflows into AI-driven experiences that measurably improve speed, accuracy, or capability—distinguishing them from infrastructure engineers building foundational AI platforms or customer-facing services.
Measured across 75 of 75 open postings.
This role is advertised at 3 levels, so a single figure for the role would describe none of them. Experience and pay are the midpoints for each level on its own.
| Level | Share | Median years | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | 53%(40) | 3 | $240k |
| Senior | 20%(15) | 4.5 | — |
| Staff / Principal | 20%(15) | 7.5 | — |
A dash means too few postings stated it to report a midpoint. Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 2 levels with fewer than 10 open postings are not shown.
“Experience building production AI systems using LLMs. Experience with modern AI tooling, including OpenAI, Claude, MCP, agent frameworks, vector databases, or retrieval systems.”
“Practical experience building with modern LLM tooling (agents, tool use, prompt engineering, MCP, and evals) beyond notebook experiments.”
“AI tooling is already part of how you work — you use it to write, debug, and learn faster”
“often using Codex itself as part of your development process”
Requirements are a share of every open posting, so a role missing from this list is one where almost nobody asks. Work mode is different: many postings never say, so that figure counts only the ones that do. A posting stops being advertised when it is filled, cancelled or reorganised, so read the last figure as how long these stay on the market, not as time to hire.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Full-stack product engineering
Backend and API engineering
ML systems development
Frontend interface engineering
Monitoring and observability
Data pipeline engineering
LLM application development
AI evaluation design
Agent workflow design
Agent system architecture and development
Prompt and context engineering
Retrieval and ranking systems
Inference performance optimization
AI-assisted development workflow
Enterprise AI solution architecture
AI-native product design
AI workflow automation
Hands-on AI tool fluency
AI safety and guardrails
Customer-facing technical delivery
Technical communication
Rapid prototyping and iteration
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
75 open Applied AI Engineer jobs across 43 companies.
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