Prompt Engineer – a brand new AI-related job

In recent weeks, information about a job in the field of AI, which does not require any programming skills and allows for six-figure earnings, has resonated widely on the labor market.

We are talking about the Prompt Engineer position. More and more companies publish job advertisements for this position. How many of them are part of the employer branding campaign and how many are real announcements? We won't find out, but one thing is certain - prompt engineers are already working in many companies developing AI.

What is prompt engineering?

Prompt engineering is the process of designing and refining prompts for natural language processing (NLP) models. In the context of machine learning and AI, prompts are the initial input given to a language model to generate its output.

The goal of prompt engineering is to create effective prompts that will produce accurate and meaningful outputs from the model. This involves selecting the right set of keywords, phrases, and structures that will help guide the model to produce the desired response.

Prompt engineering is an iterative process, where the prompts are tested and refined until the desired level of accuracy is achieved. It is a crucial step in the development of NLP models, as the quality of the prompts has a significant impact on the accuracy and effectiveness of the model.

In recent years, prompt engineering has become an increasingly important area of research in NLP, as it has been shown to be a powerful tool for improving the performance of language models.

While prompt engineering is a critical aspect of developing natural language processing models, Prompt Engineer was not a commonly used job title by now. However, individuals working in the field of NLP or machine learning may be responsible for prompt engineering as part of their job responsibilities.

Job titles that may involve prompt engineering tasks could include NLP engineer, machine learning engineer, data scientist, or AI researcher, among others. These professionals work on developing, testing, and refining language models, which can include creating and optimizing prompts.

As in any profession, also in the area of the development of artificial intelligence, the increase in its popularity and level of complexity entails the need to specialize employees. The result of this phenomenon is the creation of the Prompt Engineer position.

Does Prompt Engineer need IT education?

Not necessarily, but a lot depends on the company that recruits, the industry in which it operates and the maturity of the market.

Copy.ai was undoubtedly one of the pioneers in hiring Prompt Engineers in the world. Prompt engineering is a key area of work in this company due to the fact that it specializes in creating tools that imitate human speech.

One of the Prompt Engineers working for Copy.ai is Anna Bernstein from New York. She studied English in college and before becoming Prompt Engineer she was a copywriter and historical research assistant. She said in an article for Time that she “had no tech background whatsoever” and having a humanities background was very helpful for her “especially since part of the point of developing AI is to imitate human thought” – as she says.

In recent days, also the Polish labor market has become loud about prompt engineering thanks to the courier company inPost, which published an advertisement for the position of Prompt Engineer. Requirements for this advertisement include: relevant education or experience working with artificial intelligence, so a degree in computer science may be necessary to get this job. We expect that other companies will follow in the footsteps of inpost and we keep our fingers crossed for their success in attracting specialists in this area, who will not be easy to find.

How much can a Prompt Engineer earn?

Unfortunately, the salary range offered by inPost for this position has not been disclosed, but several companies around the world have shared information on how much they are ready to pay specialists in this field.

For example Anthropic, a Google-backed AI startup located in San Francisco, CA is looking for a Prompt Engineer and Librarian. The expected salary range for this position is $280k - $375k annually. As the company is aware that prompt engineering is a fairly new area of expertise, applicants do not need to have “years of experience” in the field, but they should describe their prompt engineering project in the resume:

“Given that the field of prompt-engineering is arguably less than 2 years old, this position is a bit hard to hire for!  As a result, we ask that you share with us a specific prompt engineering project on LLMs that you’re proud of in your application!  Ideally this project should show off a complex and clever prompting architecture or a systematic evaluation of an LLM’s behavior.”

Also a consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton recently posted prompt engineering job in Bethesda, MD, with the salary up to $212 000 a year for applicants with more than three years of experience in the field of implementing machine learning models.

One can develop a Prompt Engineer career also outside a tech world. Boston Children’s Hospital is looking for a AI Prompt Engineer IDHA. A new employe will be responsible for designing and developing AI prompts using large language models (e.g., GPT-3, ChatGPT) and other solutions as they emerge for healthcare research studies and clinical practice.

Recently more and more Prompt Engineer jobs are advertised around the world – in Canada, Sweden, Australia, Berlin or Minsk. Browse the list of jobs published on joblist.ai. Maybe you'll find something for yourself?

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