Untitled

Properties

title

Context Engineer

family

context-engineering

maturity

growing

owns

Designs the full information environment an LLM operates in: retrieval (chunking, embeddings, reranking), memory (short-term session vs long-term store), tool integrations, and guardrails so production AI is trustworthy.

skills

[RAG pipeline design (chunking, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, reranking)][vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector)][memory architecture and context-window management][LangChain / LlamaIndex / LangGraph and MCP][eval and monitoring of retrieval quality][Python]

pay

low: 185000

high: 245000

currency: USD

basis: base

seniority

senior-ic

distinctFrom

Positioned as the successor to the prompt engineer: instead of crafting single prompts, it engineers the retrieval, memory, and tool context around the model, which is a genuine software-architecture discipline.

source

Context Engineer salary analysis (May 2026): US senior-IC base $185K-$245K, frontier-lab total comp above $500K

notes

Pay updated from the original approximate Glassdoor-derived band ($130K-$220K) to a 2026 context-engineer-specific analysis: US senior-IC base $185K-$245K, with staff total comp exceeding $400K and frontier-lab (OpenAI, Anthropic) total comp above $500K. Anthropic and OpenAI now hire 'Context Engineer' explicitly, and the role sits in the highest-paid cluster of the new AI engineering disciplines. Sourced from a May 2026 salary analysis (secondary); a single authoritative posting series is still forming, so the figure is flagged for review.