NLP Career Path: Jobs in Natural Language Processing

A career in natural language processing (NLP) is a path to a growing field that leverages AI and machine learning models, enabling computers to understand and respond to human speech. At a glance, here's what you can expect from a career in natural language processing:

• NLP professionals earn competitive salaries, ranging from $89,000 to $304,000 [2,7].

• Careers in the field include NLP engineers, NLP research scientists, and AI product manager, among many others.

• To enter the field, you'll likely need to earn at least a bachelor's degree and build the right skills.

In this article, you'll explore four natural language processing career paths, how to get started in the field, and what you can expect to earn in each one. Afterward, if you want to start building NLP skills yourself, consider enrolling in DeepLearning.AI's Natural Language Processing Specialization.

What is the natural language processing career path?

You may notice that many NLP job descriptions list similar skills, like programming, software development, and linguistics. NLP technology and the fields that support it are evolving as customer-facing products that use NLP are starting to become more common. Many roles in NLP will allow you to design and build NLP models.

With so many different ways companies and organizations can use natural language processing, you can pursue an NLP career working on various projects. If you are new to the field, you may start in an entry-level job like a junior NLP engineer. After gaining experience or advanced education, you will likely move into positions with more responsibility. Later in your career, you may qualify for leadership positions or director roles on your team. Explore what your NLP career path might look like. 

Entry-level NLP jobs

You may be able to start working in an entry-level natural language processing job after earning an associate’s degree, although it’s common for professionals in this field to start in the field with a bachelor’s degree. You can begin with an entry-level job for practical experience you can use to continue your career path. Two entry-level careers in NLP to explore are junior NLP engineer and junior data analyst. 

1. Junior NLP engineer

Median total salary: $116,000 [1]

As a junior NLP engineer, you will work with a team of other NLP professionals to design and develop natural language processing systems. In this role, some of your job duties will include preprocessing data and supporting more senior engineers to implement NLP algorithms. 

2. Junior data analyst

Median total salary: $89,000 [2]

As a junior data analyst, you will play a supportive role on a data analytics team. Some of your job responsibilities will include collecting and processing data, creating data visualizations, and writing reports of your team’s findings. 

Mid-level positions in NLP

As you start to gain experience or pursue advanced degrees, you may qualify for more highly paid jobs with more responsibility. In the middle of your career, you will develop your skills with NLP and machine learning techniques and begin to take on leadership roles. Three mid-level careers for NLP professionals include NLP engineer, Data Scientist, and conversational AI developer. 

1. NLP engineer

Median total salary: $162,000 [3]

As an NLP engineer, you will design, build, train, test, and refine natural language processing models. You may work with a team of other professionals to integrate NLP technology into software and other development projects. 

To start a career in NLP engineering, you'll likely need to earn a bachelor’s degree, although more advanced positions may prefer that you earn a master’s degree. You may be able to find an entry-level job with an associate degree and related experience or certification in NLP. You can start earning experience as a junior NLP engineer before moving into roles like NLP engineer, NLP software engineer, or machine learning engineer.

2. Data scientist (NLP-focused)

Median total salary: $153,000 [4]

Data scientists work to make sense of large data sets, extracting key information and determining patterns from them to help businesses make better-informed data-driven decisions. Many data scientists use AI in their day-to-day work.

NLP plays a role in modern data science. NLP is, after all, a combination of data science, computational linguistics, ML, and deep learning. As a data scientist, your core ability to glean key information from large data sets allows you to help programmers develop more accurate NLP models.

3. Conversational AI developer

Median total salary: $100,000 [5]

As a conversational AI developer, you will have a similar job to an NLP engineer working to design and create NLP models and algorithms, but you will focus on chatbots and conversational machines, which are AI models people can talk to. 

Senior-level jobs in NLP

To move into a senior job in natural language processing, you’ll need to gain many years of experience in the field or advanced degrees like a master’s or doctorate. At this level, you will take on a leadership role or may advance to a position directing a department. Three potential careers to consider for later in your NLP career path include senior NLP researcher, director of NLP engineering, and AI product manager. 

1. Senior NLP researcher

Median total salary: $241,000 [6] 

As a senior natural language processing researcher, you will design and conduct research experiments, lead a research team, and use the scientific process to develop NLP solutions. You will also share your findings with stakeholders in your organization or the greater scientific community. 

2. Director of engineering (NLP)

Median total salary: $304,000 [7]

As the director of NLP engineering, you will lead the NLP engineering department to meet your company or organization’s goals. You will help set your team's NLP strategy and ensure that the NLP models your team creates provide value. 

3. AI product manager

Median total salary: $190,000 [8]

AI product managers work on projects that feature AI technology, such as NLP models, or use AI to improve and enhance existing projects. In this role, you'll likely conduct research to determine your customers or clients’ needs and then collaborate with other teams to design and build the product.

NLP applications across industries

NLP engineers and scientists have developed many different applications for NLP technology. You can explore NLP use cases in industries like finance, health care, data analysis, and marketing, as well as for personal and everyday uses like email filtering and smart assistants. 

• Finance: Financial professionals can use NLP to process vast amounts of financial data and summarize or make predictions. 

• Health care: Medical professionals and people working in health care can use NLP in many ways, including analyzing patient records, writing or summarizing medical research papers, and helping health care workers make data-driven decisions quickly. 

• Data analysis: Data scientists can use NLP to speak conversationally with an AI agent trained on their data. NLP can also make predictions about effective visualizations for a data set. 

• Marketing: Marketing professionals can use NLP to analyze people’s online discussions about their brand, such as in online reviews or when people mention their brand or product on social media. NLP can offer insight into whether these comments have a positive or negative sentiment, providing a marketer with data they can use to fine-tune their marketing strategy. 

• Smart tech: Natural language processing is the technology that allows your email account to tell the difference between spam and emails you might care about. You also use NLP when you converse with a smart assistant like Alexa or Siri. 

Is NLP a good career path?

Natural language processing is a growing industry, and jobs in the field are predicted to grow over the next decade.

Although the US Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t specifically track NLP jobs, related positions are expected to grow. For example, the US BLS projects that data scientist job openings will grow by 34 percent and computer and information research scientist job openings will grow by 20 percent in the next decade [9,10]. Furthermore, research published on Statista predicts the NLP market will grow to $201.49 billion by 2031 [11].

Prepare for your NLP career path on Coursera.

Check out the following natural language processing and AI resources to keep learning more.

• Take the Quiz: Which AI Course Should You Take? Find Out in 1 Minute

• Watch on YouTube: Understanding Chatbots: Types, Uses & Future of AI Communication

• Learn essential AI and NLP terms: Artificial Intelligence Glossary: Learn AI Vocabulary

Accelerate your career growth with a Coursera Plus subscription. When you enroll in either the monthly or annual option, you’ll get access to over 10,000 courses.