LLM engineer jobs

LLM engineer is a job title, not a job category, and a narrow one at that. Of 26,929 live AI-related postings Level tracks, only 63 carry the words LLM engineer, against 221 titled AI engineer and 206 titled machine learning engineer.

The number this article rests on: 63 of 26,929 live postings carry the title LLM engineer, the smallest of the three titles this page compares. Measured September 2026.

A rare title is still a real question with four honest answers: how many postings use it, whether it pays more than the nearby titles, which tools show up in them, and where the work sits on Level's four-level scale. Every answer below comes from the live catalogue, not from a course description or a hiring guide, and is re-measured every six hours.

How many jobs are titled LLM engineer?

63 live postings, out of 26,929 tracked across the whole catalogue. That is fewer than the 221 postings titled AI engineer and the 206 titled machine learning engineer, the two broader titles most LLM-focused work is filed under instead. Measured September 2026.

That gap does not mean LLM work itself is scarce, only that most of it is filed under a wider title. The pattern holds across the whole catalogue: a narrow, specific job title almost always trails the broader discipline it sits inside, and counting titles alone will undercount the underlying work by a wide margin. Anyone hiring or job-hunting for this exact skill set should read the AI engineer and machine learning engineer numbers as the fuller picture, not a separate market.

Does an LLM engineer get paid more than a machine learning engineer?

On 18 live LLM engineer postings that publish a USD range, the median maximum is $237,500. That sits below the $273,500 median maximum for machine learning engineer on 74 postings, and below the $274,550 figure for AI engineer on 94 postings. Measured September 2026.

Read this comparison as a live snapshot, not a fixed multiple. A median built on a small title-matched sample can move further from one refresh to the next than a median built on a broader population, so the gap between LLM engineer and its two neighboring titles is exactly the kind of figure that is worth re-checking rather than memorizing. What holds steady is the direction of the comparison across recent snapshots, more than the precise dollar spread.

What tools do LLM engineer jobs use?

Among the retrieval and serving tools this page tracks, LangChain (189 live postings) show up in the catalogue this month, while LlamaIndex, vLLM, Hugging Face, and pgvector do not clear the top 20 tools ranked this month. Measured September 2026.

This list only tracks tools already inside the top tools this catalogue names each month, so a tool that is common in practice but rare in posting text will not surface here. That absence is a measurement gap, not proof the tool is unused; postings describe requirements in plain language, and not every hiring manager names a specific library where a resume-screening tool or an applicant tracking system might otherwise catch it. Treat the tools that do appear as a floor on real demand, not a ceiling.

What Level is an LLM engineer job?

Level does not tag a title with a level directly; it rates what the posting text describes. Building with large language models is close to the definition of Level 4, where 772 of 26,929 live postings sit (2.9%), with a median maximum salary of $246,750 on 385 USD postings. Measured September 2026.

Level and title are two different measurements, and this page keeps them separate rather than assuming one predicts the other. Plenty of postings that never use the words LLM engineer still sit at Level 4 because the day-to-day work is building with models rather than calling a hosted API from the side. That is precisely why the title count above and the Level 4 count here should be read as complementary views of the same underlying market, not as competing answers to the same question.

The jobs right now

Live postings whose title or text names an LLM engineer, newest first, generated from the catalogue and refreshed every six hours.

Browse every Level 4 posting, where building with models is closer to the rule than the exception, on the Level 4 page. Two tools that recur in that search are LangChain and LlamaIndex. The companion page on machine learning engineer jobs covers the larger, better-measured title next door.

Method

• Scope: live postings whose title contains the word LLM, read against the wider catalogue of postings rated Level 1 to 4 from the tools and tasks named in the text.
• Sample: 26,929 live jobs, of which 11,953 publish a salary and 10,606 publish it in USD.
• Measured: September 2026, from the live catalogue at jobsbylevel.com, refreshed every six hours.
• Currency: USD only, no conversions. Medians are on the posted maximum unless stated.
• Not measured: a title match is on the word LLM only, so postings that describe the same work under a different title are not counted here; medians on small samples are shown as published, not smoothed.