Side-by-side distribution
Backend Engineer
$185,375
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 33%
- Live roles
- 2,443
Prompt Engineer
$198,750
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 28.4%
- Live roles
- 88
Highest-paying jobs
Senior Staff Backend Engineer ($500k - $1.5m salary)
Intermediate Backend Software Engineer
Staff Software Engineer (Backend)
Lead Software Engineer (Backend)
Senior/Staff Backend Engineer, Applied AI
Backend Engineer, AI
Backend Engineer
Senior Backend Engineer
Senior Backend Engineer (Java)
Senior Backend Engineer (Java)
Highest-paying jobs
Machine Learning Engineer, Speech LLM Training - San Francisco
Machine Learning Engineer, Model Evaluations (Speech LLM) - San Francisco
Principal Machine Learning Engineer- LLM Fine-tuning and Optimization
Machine Learning Engineer, Inference & Serving (Speech LLM) - San Francisco
Machine Learning Engineer, LLM Evals & Observability
Machine Learning Engineer, LLM Evals & Observability
Principal LLM Inference Engineer
Staff Attack Engineer, AI/LLM
Staff ML/LLM Ops Engineer
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, CustomerLake (ML/LLM)
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
Air Apps
|
$68,094 | 33 |
Affirm
|
$183,000 | 20 |
|
Databricks
|
$205,100 | 16 |
Grafana Labs
|
$192,485 | 15 |
OpenAI
|
$309,000 | 9 |
Teleport
|
$261,440 | 9 |
Whoop
|
$150,000 | 9 |
Satispay
|
$55,934 | 9 |
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
|
Plaud
|
$282,500 | 3 |
|
Glean
|
$250,000 | 2 |
Zscaler
|
$167,750 | 2 |
|
Airbnb
|
$328,500 | 1 |
|
Horizon3 AI
|
$249,000 | 1 |
|
LVT
|
$242,650 | 1 |
|
d-Matrix
|
$240,000 | 1 |
|
Databricks
|
$226,000 | 1 |
Backend Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $220,000 | 166 |
| New York | $207,500 | 165 |
| Seattle | $205,500 | 38 |
| Denver | $195,875 | 4 |
| Austin | $194,500 | 7 |
| Los Angeles | $184,075 | 12 |
| Chicago | $175,000 | 5 |
| Boston | $175,000 | 21 |
| Singapore | $151,034 | 3 |
| Toronto | $149,375 | 38 |
Prompt Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $250,000 | 7 |
| New York | $197,500 | 3 |
Backend Engineer vs Prompt Engineer: which pays more?
The median for Backend Engineer is $185,375 per year (typically $145,499–$225,000), versus $198,750 for Prompt Engineer ($180,000–$243,238). That puts Prompt Engineer about 7% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so Backend Engineer and Prompt Engineer are compared on equal terms regardless of the currency each role was originally posted in. Only roles that publish a salary range feed the medians; numbers refresh every few hours as new roles post and older ones close, so this comparison reflects the market right now rather than a fixed survey. Use it as a directional benchmark when weighing one path against the other.