Side-by-side distribution
Firmware Engineer
$191,000
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 54.3%
- Live roles
- 197
Prompt Engineer
$198,750
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 28.4%
- Live roles
- 88
Highest-paying jobs
Firmware Engineer, Robotics
ASIC Firmware Engineer, Modeling
Networking Operating System Firmware Engineer
Firmware Engineer, RTOS, Consumer Devices
Staff Embedded Firmware Engineer
Firmware/ Embedded Systems Engineer
Founding Firmware Engineer
Firmware Engineer, Robotics and Surgery Engineering
Staff Embedded Software Engineer - Camera Firmware
Staff Firmware Engineer
Highest-paying jobs
Machine Learning Engineer, Speech LLM Training - San Francisco
Principal Machine Learning Engineer- LLM Fine-tuning and Optimization
Machine Learning Engineer, Model Evaluations (Speech LLM) - San Francisco
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
Software Engineer, Artificial Intelligence/LLM (Multiple Seniority Levels)
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
|
Anduril Industries
|
$222,000 | 14 |
|
OpenAI
|
$345,500 | 4 |
ALSO
|
$187,500 | 4 |
CoreWeave
|
$197,500 | 3 |
Mach Industries
|
$172,500 | 3 |
ALTEN Technology USA
|
$120,000 | 3 |
42dot
|
$228,000 | 2 |
Everpure
|
$216,250 | 2 |
Zscaler
Five9
Firmware Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $210,458 | 14 |
| New York | $197,500 | 7 |
Prompt Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $250,000 | 7 |
| New York | $197,500 | 3 |
Firmware Engineer vs Prompt Engineer: which pays more?
The median for Firmware Engineer is $191,000 per year (typically $160,000–$215,000), versus $198,750 for Prompt Engineer ($180,000–$243,238). That puts Prompt Engineer about 4% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so Firmware 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.