How much should you expect to make with a UX Engineer career in the USA? We gathered our information through anonymous submissions from our global community of over 300,000 designers. Based on this data, UX Engineers who work in the United States make an average of $90,000 every year, ranging from about $60,000 to approximately $165,000.

Let’s break down our findings on average UX Engineer salaries by experience.

Entry-level UX Engineer salary in the USA

Entry-level UX Engineers are those who are just starting out and have no professional experience in the design industry. They may be recent university graduates or people who have decided to shift careers. If this description of entry-level UX Engineers matches you and you work in the USA, you can expect to make an average of $56,000 per year.

Junior UX Engineer salary in the USA

Junior UX Engineers usually have 1 to 3 years of experience in the field. They are still getting to know the industry, but they can already work in a team setting and produce very valuable work. In the USA, junior UX Engineers usually make about $74,500 per year.

Mid-level UX Engineer salary the USA

Mid-level UX Engineers are those who have been working in the field for quite a few years (usually 3 to 8) and have gained significant experience. They are proficient in their craft and tend to produce higher-quality work than junior UX/UI designers. If this description of mid-level UX Engineers matches you and you work in the USA you can expect to make an average of $110,000 per year.

Senior UX Engineer salary the USA

Senior UX Engineers usually have upwards of 8 years of experience in their field. They are proficient in what they do and often produce the highest-quality work in the shortest time. In the USA, senior UX Engineers usually make about $130,000 per year.

What Do UX Engineers Do?

UX engineers are UX designers with more technical skills. Like UX designers, they have a solid knowledge of design principles, user research, and research analysis. In addition, UX engineers possess strong technical skills in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They can foresee technical violations and avoid mistakes before designs go to implementation.

What do UX engineers do?

  • Create wireframes and prototypes for testing ideas
  • Design webpages using design software
  • Use programming languages to create layouts, interactive features, and other design ideas
  • Collaborate with UX designers and other engineers

Skills to Increase UX Engineer Salaries

UX engineers deal a lot with the frontend part of a product and need more than just wireframing and design software skills. They should focus on learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build functional and intuitive websites.

UX engineers cannot succeed without understanding of basic UX design skills and concepts like user psychology, UX design principles, typography, and color theory, and following a human-centered approach.

  • Leadership abilities, including project management, design thinking, and workshop facilitation. Depending on your level of seniority, team management skills may also be required. Having a UX design credential easily helps demonstrate these skills.
  • Team working and communication skills, as well as critical thinking and problem solving, creativity, openness to feedback, and effective time management. Empathy is especially important, both toward your teammates and your users.
  • Above all, what sets UX Engineers apart is their understanding of native platform languages, such as HTML and CSS for the web.
  • Basic knowledge of prototyping and wireframing in high and low fidelity, which will help you communicate and test your ideas and experiments.
  • The ability to conduct quantitative research and analyze your findings mathematically, producing quantitative research artifacts.
  • The ability to conduct qualitative research and usability testing and analyze your findings thematically, producing qualitative research artifacts.
  • The ability to build a design system, manage it, and scale it across projects and teams consistently.

Career Paths for UX Engineers

Designer career path

While there are several UX design careers and specializations, to become a UX engineer, you may need to pursue a bachelor's degree or take a course in computer science, human-computer interaction, design, or psychology.

A background in UX or UI design, product design, user research, or web development can give you an advantage over other job seekers if you transfer to UX engineering from another field.