Side-by-side distribution
Penetration Tester
$180,000
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 32.9%
- Live roles
- 70
Prompt Engineer
$197,500
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 31.8%
- Live roles
- 88
Highest-paying jobs
Offensive Security Engineer, Agent Products
Offensive Hardware Security Engineer, Platform Security
Member of Technical Staff (Offensive Security Engineer)
Principal Offensive Security Engineer
Senior Information Security Engineer, Offensive Security
Staff Offensive Security Engineer
Senior Information Security Engineer, Offensive Security
Penetration Tester
WebApp Offensive Security Software Engineer
Offensive Security Engineer
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 |
|---|---|---|
| GR GRVTY | $215,000 | 2 |
|
Robinhood
|
$191,444 | 2 |
|
Accenture Federal Services
|
$174,200 | 2 |
M9 Solutions
|
$120,000 | 2 |
TP-Link Systems Inc.
|
$106,000 | 2 |
|
OpenAI
|
$418,500 | 1 |
|
Anthropic
|
$362,500 | 1 |
|
Perplexity
|
$312,500 | 1 |
Zscaler
Five9
Penetration Tester salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| Seattle | $362,500 | 3 |
| San Francisco | $312,500 | 5 |
| New York | $236,000 | 7 |
Prompt Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $250,000 | 7 |
| New York | $197,500 | 3 |
Penetration Tester vs Prompt Engineer: which pays more?
The median for Penetration Tester is $180,000 per year (typically $136,250–$218,250), versus $197,500 for Prompt Engineer ($158,813–$241,325). That puts Prompt Engineer about 10% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so Penetration Tester 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.