Side-by-side distribution
Data Engineer
$170,000
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 34.5%
- Live roles
- 3,152
MLOps
$187,500
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 18.8%
- Live roles
- 128
Highest-paying jobs
Senior Data Engineer
Senior Data Engineer
Senior Data Engineer
Data Engineer
Staff / Principal Data Engineer
Senior Data Engineer
Senior Data Engineer
Data Center Design Engineer, Electrical - Industrial Compute
Software Engineer, Frontier Data Products
Data Engineer
Highest-paying jobs
Senior Machine Learning Engineer, DevOps/SRE
Staff Machine Learning Operations Engineer
Senior Data Engineer, MLOps [Remote-US]
Senior, ML Engineer - ML Ops Framework
Senior, ML Engineer - ML Ops Framework
Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer
Staff ML/LLM Ops Engineer
Sr. Machine Learning Ops Engineer
DoD MLOps Software Engineer
Sr. Machine Learning Ops Engineer
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
Speechify
|
$170,000 | 103 |
Mindrift
|
$76,960 | 57 |
Accenture Federal Services
|
$153,850 | 22 |
Esri
|
$134,264 | 16 |
Olsson
|
$122,500 | 14 |
Anduril Industries
|
$174,500 | 13 |
|
OpenAI
|
$312,000 | 12 |
Air Apps
|
$70,422 | 10 |
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
|
Garner Health
|
$297,500 | 2 |
|
Torc Robotics
|
$249,000 | 2 |
|
Quanata
|
$256,500 | 1 |
|
Roku
|
$254,875 | 1 |
|
LVT
|
$242,650 | 1 |
|
Hayden AI
|
$230,000 | 1 |
Instacart
|
$212,750 | 1 |
|
Cimgroup
|
$200,000 | 1 |
Data Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $216,000 | 165 |
| New York | $200,000 | 159 |
| Seattle | $185,750 | 45 |
| Austin | $177,500 | 25 |
| Chicago | $170,000 | 39 |
| Boston | $170,000 | 32 |
| Atlanta | $170,000 | 11 |
| Los Angeles | $160,000 | 19 |
| Denver | $159,370 | 25 |
| Toronto | $150,000 | 27 |
Data Engineer vs MLOps: which pays more?
The median for Data Engineer is $170,000 per year (typically $140,938–$207,500), versus $187,500 for MLOps ($147,500–$236,325). That puts MLOps about 10% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so Data Engineer and MLOps 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.