Side-by-side distribution
Principal Engineer
$223,250
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 46.2%
- Live roles
- 1,771
Prompt Engineer
$198,750
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 28.4%
- Live roles
- 88
Highest-paying jobs
Principal Software Engineer
Distinguished Engineer
Staff / Principal Data Engineer
Principal Engineer (Payments)
Principal Engineer
Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Delivery
Principal Research Engineer, Model Training & Post-Training
Principal Engineer, Agentic AI Systems
Principal .NET Software Engineer - Cloud Payments Platform
Principal .NET Software Engineer- Cloud Payments Platform
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 |
|---|---|---|
Roblox
|
$320,145 | 42 |
| AL Astera Labs | $207,500 | 21 |
Motional
|
$285,000 | 20 |
Elastic
|
$134,329 | 18 |
| SE Sezzle | $111,000 | 16 |
Anduril Industries
|
$256,000 | 13 |
Zscaler
|
$207,188 | 13 |
Snowflake
|
$321,750 | 12 |
Five9
Principal Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $278,000 | 70 |
| New York | $259,500 | 60 |
| Boston | $250,000 | 45 |
| Chicago | $232,500 | 15 |
| Seattle | $232,175 | 34 |
| Austin | $232,000 | 10 |
| Los Angeles | $225,000 | 31 |
| Toronto | $210,000 | 16 |
| London | $199,724 | 16 |
| Denver | $190,000 | 17 |
Prompt Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $250,000 | 7 |
| New York | $197,500 | 3 |
Principal Engineer vs Prompt Engineer: which pays more?
The median for Principal Engineer is $223,250 per year (typically $187,500–$275,639), versus $198,750 for Prompt Engineer ($180,000–$243,238). That puts Principal Engineer about 12% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so Principal 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.