AEAI Engineer
AE
Career

AI Engineer

By the numbers
Typical pay
$140,300 / yr
Education to start
Master's degree
Future demand
+19.7% by 2034
People in this job
37K
Figures shown for ·closest of 3 O*NET occupations
The work
A day, hour by hour
09:00
Model check-in

Pull overnight metrics — did the live model drift or degrade?

09:30
Standup & triage

Sync with data scientists and PM. Sort blocked tickets from ready ones.

09:50
Data wrangling

Clean a messy new dataset; bad labels get flagged and fixed before training.

11:00
Model training

Fine-tune a pre-trained model — scratch build would take weeks for no gain.

13:30
Bias & error audit

Test outputs for wrong answers and bias; one pattern is bad enough to flag.

14:30
Stakeholder explainer

Walk the product team through how the model decides — no jargon allowed.

15:15
API integration

Wire the model to the app via API so the product team can actually use it.

16:30
Research block

Skim two new papers; one technique looks worth a quick experiment tomorrow.

17:15
Ship & monitor

Push the updated model to production; set alerts for performance drops.

Things you do
  • Build and train AI models that learn patterns from data.
  • Write code to connect AI models to real apps and products.
  • Clean and wrangle messy datasets so models can actually learn.
  • Test models to catch errors, bias, or embarrassing wrong answers.
  • Deploy a working AI model to production and keep it running.
Decisions you’ll make
  • Is my model actually learning something real, or just memorizing the training data?
  • Should I build a custom model from scratch, or fine-tune an existing one?
  • Is this model good enough to ship, or could a bad prediction cause real harm?
  • Do I flag this bias in the model's outputs, even if it delays the launch?
  • Should I explain how this works to the stakeholder, or just show them the results?
Education Pathways · how you get there
99 in 100 went the college route · 1 in 100 found another way in None, typically
Education mapped from O*NET:
If you like this, also look at