The full taxonomy
Nine roles, defined honestly.
Each definition was written by us, not pulled from a job board. Use them to calibrate a JD, scope a search, or check whether a candidate's title actually matches what they do.
Agentic AI Engineer
Builds production agents end-to-end — tool use, memory, evals, and the unglamorous reliability work in between.
$180K – $260K base (US, senior)
AI Agent Architect
Designs the system shape — which agents exist, what they own, how they hand off, and where the human stays in the loop.
$220K – $320K base (US, staff/principal)
Agent Orchestration Engineer
Owns the runtime — how multi-step agent runs stay reliable, observable, and cheap under real traffic.
$190K – $280K base (US, senior/staff)
Agentic AI Process Engineer
Bridges ops and engineering — finds repeatable workflows in the business and replaces them with agents that actually ship value.
$160K – $230K base (US, senior)
AI-First Software Engineer
A generalist software engineer who treats LLMs as a first-class building block — not a sprinkle on top of a normal app.
$170K – $240K base (US, senior)
Agentic Native Software Engineer
Builds applications where the agent is the product, not a feature — the kind of software that doesn't make sense in a pre-agent world.
$150K – $220K base (US, mid–senior)
AI Systems Engineer
Lives at the seam between agents and the systems they depend on — caching, routing, prompt infrastructure, model gateways.
$200K – $290K base (US, senior/staff)
AI Data Engineer
Owns the data pipelines that feed agents — embeddings, retrieval indexes, eval datasets, traces, and the feedback loop back into prompts.
$170K – $250K base (US, senior)
AI Integrations Engineer
Connects agents to the rest of the world — APIs, MCP servers, SaaS tools, internal systems, and the auth between them.
$170K – $240K base (US, senior)
Next step
Pick the role that fits and start there.
Whether you're hiring or looking, the role pages have the rubric we use. Bring your toughest requirement to a 30-minute call.