Side-by-side distribution
Prompt Engineer
$197,500
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 31.8%
- Live roles
- 88
Research Scientist
$219,375
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 53.2%
- Live roles
- 380
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)
Highest-paying jobs
Research Scientist, Interpretability
Research Engineer/Research Scientist, Pre-training
Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Personal AGI, Personality and Model Behavior
Research Engineer / Research Scientist -Personal AGI, Proactivity
Research Engineer/Research Scientist - Personal AGI, North Stars
Research Engineer / Research Scientist- Personal AGI (Post Training)
Staff / Principal Research Scientist - USA
Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Tokens
Research Engineer / Scientist, Alignment
[Expression of Interest] Research Engineer / Scientist, Alignment - London
Zscaler
Five9
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
|
Anthropic
|
$402,500 | 11 |
Anduril Industries
|
$221,000 | 8 |
Astera Institute
|
$225,000 | 7 |
Waabi
|
$212,750 | 6 |
|
OpenAI
|
$425,000 | 5 |
| SA Scale AI | $243,000 | 5 |
Nuro
|
$229,900 | 5 |
World Labs
|
$300,000 | 4 |
Prompt Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $250,000 | 7 |
| New York | $197,500 | 3 |
Research Scientist salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| Boston | $275,000 | 8 |
| San Francisco | $265,000 | 66 |
| Seattle | $252,725 | 10 |
| New York | $243,000 | 37 |
| Toronto | $212,000 | 8 |
| London | $203,341 | 10 |
| Los Angeles | $80,000 | 3 |
Prompt Engineer vs Research Scientist: which pays more?
The median for Prompt Engineer is $197,500 per year (typically $158,813–$241,325), versus $219,375 for Research Scientist ($176,950–$275,000). That puts Research Scientist about 11% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so Prompt Engineer and Research Scientist 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.