3 New Roles Born in the AI Era
Since 2023, with AI's full spread, "roles that didn't exist before" are demanded within companies. Representatives are prompt engineer / AI PM / AI Ops. This article organizes these 3 roles' duties, skills, salary, future.
1. Prompt Engineer
Role
A specialist who designs/improves instructions (prompts) to the LLM. "A craftsman drawing the best answer from AI." Turning internal knowledge into a Custom GPT, testing/stabilizing prompts when embedding into work flows, etc.
Needed Skills
- Prompt techniques (Few-shot, CoT, structuring, evaluation)
- Domain knowledge (specific fields like law, medical, sales)
- Language sense (writing that eliminates ambiguity)
- Evaluation design (A/B, Eval, quantitative criteria)
Salary (2026, Japan)
- Junior (under 1 year): 5-7M yen
- Mid (2-3 years): 7-12M yen
- Senior (lead): 12-20M yen
- In the US, USD 200K-400K (multiple reports)
Future: "Disappearing" or "Evolving" Role?
Unlike the 2023 hype period, now "side" over "dedicated" is mainstream. The state where Software Engineers and PMs "can also prompt" is standardizing. Meanwhile, prompt engineers specialized in specific domains (legal AI, medical AI) still see growing demand.
