Side-by-side distribution
Platform Engineer
$195,000
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 44.3%
- Live roles
- 4,041
Prompt Engineer
$198,750
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 28.4%
- Live roles
- 88
Highest-paying jobs
Platform Engineer
Senior Staff+ Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform
Staff+ Infrastructure Engineer, Cluster Infrastructure
Software Engineer, Research Infrastructure
Senior Security Platform Engineer I
Principal .NET Software Engineer- Cloud Payments Platform
Principal .NET Software Engineer - Cloud Payments Platform
Staff+ Software Engineer, Safeguards Infrastructure
SOC Emulation Engineer - Hardware Emulation Infrastructure
Infrastructure 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 |
|---|---|---|
Speechify
|
$170,000 | 103 |
OpenAI
|
$308,250 | 28 |
Nuro
|
$200,450 | 24 |
Palantir
|
$167,500 | 24 |
Databricks
|
$225,000 | 21 |
Coinbase
|
$202,483 | 20 |
Reddit
|
$244,500 | 18 |
Anduril Industries
|
$222,000 | 18 |
Zscaler
Five9
Platform Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $228,500 | 413 |
| Seattle | $214,250 | 110 |
| New York | $210,000 | 320 |
| Austin | $202,500 | 39 |
| Los Angeles | $187,500 | 31 |
| Boston | $185,000 | 64 |
| Toronto | $185,000 | 61 |
| Chicago | $183,000 | 22 |
| Denver | $180,000 | 29 |
| Atlanta | $170,000 | 10 |
Prompt Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $250,000 | 7 |
| New York | $197,500 | 3 |
Platform Engineer vs Prompt Engineer: which pays more?
The median for Platform Engineer is $195,000 per year (typically $166,525–$230,000), versus $198,750 for Prompt Engineer ($180,000–$243,238). That puts Prompt Engineer about 2% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so Platform 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.