Side-by-side distribution
Prompt Engineer
$197,500
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 31.8%
- Live roles
- 88
Tech Lead
$185,000
median · per year, annualized USD
- Disclosing
- 34.3%
- Live roles
- 2,598
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
Senior Business Development Lead - Retail Tech & Software Services
Lead Software Engineer (Backend)
Customer Engineering Lead
Software Engineering Team Lead
Technical Lead, Safety Research
Data Engineering Lead
Lead Security Engineer
RISC-V AI / HPC & Agentic Software Engineering Lead
Staff Engineer, Emulation Technical Lead
Technical Lead Manager, Data Engineering, Trust & Safety
Zscaler
Five9
Top companies hiring
| Company | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
Anduril Industries
|
$170,000 | 33 |
STR
|
$198,250 | 26 |
Motional
|
$237,500 | 21 |
Accenture Federal Services
|
$197,750 | 21 |
Fluidstack
|
$275,000 | 19 |
Scout Motors
|
$176,250 | 17 |
|
OpenAI
|
$338,750 | 14 |
Relativity Space
|
$165,000 | 13 |
Prompt Engineer salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $250,000 | 7 |
| New York | $197,500 | 3 |
Tech Lead salary by location
| Location | Median | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| Austin | $266,500 | 24 |
| San Francisco | $237,500 | 140 |
| Seattle | $234,225 | 34 |
| New York | $220,000 | 99 |
| Boston | $215,750 | 52 |
| Denver | $183,500 | 15 |
| Atlanta | $183,188 | 14 |
| Los Angeles | $175,000 | 20 |
| Toronto | $167,673 | 26 |
| Chicago | $166,000 | 29 |
Prompt Engineer vs Tech Lead: which pays more?
The median for Prompt Engineer is $197,500 per year (typically $158,813–$241,325), versus $185,000 for Tech Lead ($152,625–$222,675). That puts Prompt Engineer about 7% ahead at the median.
Both figures are computed live from active listings on JobsRadar and normalized to annualized USD, so Prompt Engineer and Tech Lead 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.