Side-by-side distribution
Prompt Engineer
$198,750
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 28.4%
- Live roles
- 88
Security Engineer
$190,000
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 47.5%
- Live roles
- 1,984
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)
Highest-paying jobs
Cyber Security Engineer (5462)
Security Engineer
Senior Security Platform Engineer I
Senior AI Security Engineer II
Lead Security Engineer
Principal Security Engineer, Infrastructure Security
Principal Software Engineer, Infrastructure Security
Offensive Security Engineer, Agent Products
Staff+ Application Security Engineer
Staff+ Application Security Engineer - M&A
Zscaler
Five9
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
Aurora Innovation
|
$222,000 | 28 |
Anduril Industries
|
$202,000 | 20 |
Accenture Federal Services
|
$151,800 | 18 |
SpaceX
|
$142,500 | 16 |
Mozilla
|
$86,043 | 16 |
Palantir
|
$170,000 | 14 |
|
OpenAI
|
$339,000 | 13 |
|
Anthropic
|
$362,500 | 12 |
Prompt Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $250,000 | 7 |
| New York | $197,500 | 3 |
Prompt Engineer vs Security Engineer: which pays more?
The median for Prompt Engineer is $198,750 per year (typically $180,000–$243,238), versus $190,000 for Security Engineer ($153,138–$233,100). That puts Prompt Engineer about 5% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so Prompt Engineer and Security 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.