An actuary who clears her exams on schedule can be earning $150,000 before she turns 30, and she can do it from a kitchen table three states away from her company’s head office. A medical science liaison with a PharmD rarely sets foot in a hospital some weeks, yet still out-earns most first-year physicians. These jobs are posted and hiring right now, and almost none of them involve writing code that ends up on a resume under “AI experience.”
The jobs on this list share three things. They pay $150,000 or more. They can be done from home most weeks of the year. And none of them are the roles quietly getting automated out of existence, the copywriting, bookkeeping, and first-draft editing jobs that software can now do a rough version of for free. These are jobs where a person still has to show up, make a judgment call, sign their name to something, or close a deal built on trust from a video call rather than a script.
Some of these will be familiar. A few will surprise you, including one that most people assume died along with the crypto crashes of the past few years.
Machine learning engineer
Companies that spent the last few years hiring machine learning engineers by the hundred are still hiring them by the hundred, just more carefully. The average total package for the role in the US now runs close to $212,000 a year once base pay and cash bonuses are combined, and that number holds up whether the engineer works out of a San Francisco office or a spare bedroom in Ohio.
The job itself is less glamorous than the title suggests. Most of the work is building and maintaining the pipelines that feed data into a model, not having ideas about artificial general intelligence. That grunt work is exactly why the role isn’t at risk. Someone has to clean the data, retrain the model when it drifts, and catch a failure before it reaches a customer, and a chatbot can’t do that job to itself.
Hiring has shifted toward people who can own a model end to end rather than specialists who only build or only deploy. A computer science degree still helps, but plenty of machine learning engineers moved over from data analytics or backend development with a few solid projects to show for it. Remote postings for the role have stayed above two-thirds of all listings for several years running, which is unusually stable for a job title this new.
Enterprise account executive
Selling six-figure software contracts to companies that take six months to sign anything sounds like a grind, and it is, but the average pay for an enterprise account executive in software sales is now $241,147 a year, and the top quarter of earners clear well past $300,000.
What keeps this job remote-friendly, and keeps it from being automated, is the same thing that makes it hard. Closing a seven-figure deal usually takes a relationship, not a script. The people signing the checks want to talk to a human who understands their business, remembers the last conversation, and can hop on a call at 7 a.m. their time without complaint. Software can draft the proposal. It cannot build the trust that gets the signature.
Most enterprise account executives spend years in smaller sales roles first, learning how to run a long sales cycle before they’re handed accounts worth real money. Base salary is usually only part of the pay, with commission on closed deals doing most of the work above, which means the job rewards people who can handle months of no income followed by one enormous one. It isn’t for everyone, but for a confident closer willing to live with that rhythm, it’s one of the more dependable paths to $150,000 that doesn’t require a graduate degree.
Patent attorney
Every company racing to patent a new battery chemistry or a piece of AI hardware needs a lawyer who can read an engineer’s notebook and turn it into language the US Patent and Trademark Office will accept, and there aren’t enough of those lawyers to go around. The average patent attorney salary is now $155,552 a year, with top earners well past $230,000.
What makes this job AI-resistant rather than AI-adjacent is the credential wall around it. A patent attorney needs a law degree, a license to practice, and in most cases a technical background in engineering, chemistry, or biology just to sit for the patent bar exam. That combination is rare enough that demand has outpaced supply for years, long before anyone worried about software taking legal jobs.
Much of the work, researching prior art, drafting claims, and responding to examiners, can be done from anywhere with a secure internet connection, which is why patent law firms were some of the earliest legal employers to go fully remote. The pay ceiling is also unusually high for a non-litigation legal job. Patent attorneys with a specialty in a hot technical field, like semiconductor design, can out-earn partners at general practice firms twice their age.
Site reliability engineer
Every hour a company’s app sits offline costs real money, and the person whose job is to stop that from happening is a site reliability engineer, a role that barely existed fifteen years ago and now pays an average of $173,000 a year in the US.
The job sits at the intersection of software engineering and operations, and it was built for remote work almost by accident. Outages don’t wait for office hours, so SRE teams were running distributed, follow-the-sun schedules long before the rest of tech discovered remote work. Someone in Austin hands off to someone in Dublin, who hands off to someone in Singapore, and the system never sleeps even if everyone involved occasionally does.
AI tools can suggest a fix for a known bug, but they can’t take responsibility for a production system at 3 a.m. when three services fail at once for reasons nobody has seen before. That’s still a job for a person who understands the whole system well enough to make a judgment call under pressure, and companies pay for that judgment. Senior SREs with a few years of incident response behind them routinely clear $200,000 in total compensation.
Medical science liaison
A medical science liaison is the person a pharmaceutical company sends to talk science, not sales, with the specialists who prescribe its drugs. They hold PharmDs or PhDs rather than sales quotas, and the pay scale reflects it. The average salary for the role is $211,115 a year, with senior MSLs clearing $280,000 once bonuses are counted.
The role exists because drug companies are legally barred from having their sales teams discuss off-label use or detailed clinical trial data, so they built an entirely separate, scientifically credentialed job to handle that work instead. That legal wall is also why the job isn’t disappearing. Software can summarize a clinical trial. It cannot stand in for a licensed expert fielding a cardiologist’s specific question about drug interactions in a way that satisfies a regulator.
Most MSL roles are built around travel to medical conferences and one-on-one meetings with physicians, which means the job was effectively remote before remote work had a name. MSLs have always worked from home between trips, managing a territory rather than reporting to an office. Fully remote postings covering a multi-state or national territory have become the norm rather than the exception, especially in specialty areas like oncology and rare disease, where the pool of qualified clinical scientists is too thin for any one employer to insist on a home office.
Senior product manager
Somebody has to decide what a product actually does, and increasingly that person isn’t an engineer or a designer but a senior product manager who sits between both, plus sales, plus whoever is angriest about the roadmap that week. It’s a job built on judgment calls nobody else can fully make, and the pay reflects it. Average total compensation for a senior product manager in the US runs around $244,000 a year, with base salary alone averaging $176,000.
AI tools have made it faster to write a product spec or summarize customer feedback, but someone still has to decide which features matter, which customers to listen to, and which fights to pick with engineering. That’s a political and strategic skill, not a drafting one, and it’s exactly the part of the job that resists automation.
Remote senior product manager roles have become the norm rather than the exception at most software companies, since the job is fundamentally about coordinating people across time zones rather than sitting in any particular building. The path in usually runs through a few years as a regular product manager first, often after starting out in engineering, design, or a customer-facing role where you learn what the product actually needs to do.
Actuary
Insurance companies and pension funds need someone who can put a number on risks that haven’t happened yet, and that job, actuary, has one of the stranger pay structures in corporate America. Your salary rises every time you pass a professional exam, whether or not your title changes. The median annual wage for actuaries sits at $125,770 as of the latest federal wage data, a figure that blends people a year into their first exam with Fellows who’ve passed them all.
A credentialed Fellow with a decade of experience, or a chief actuary signing off on a company’s regulatory filings, routinely earns well past $150,000, and increasingly does it from home. Actuarial exams are standardized and taken independently of any employer, which gives actuaries a portable credential that travels with them and makes remote arrangements easy to negotiate.
The job has survived decades of automation scares because the actual work, pricing risk correctly enough that a company doesn’t go broke, requires judgment about real-world uncertainty that a spreadsheet can’t take responsibility for on its own. Someone has to sign the filing. Right now, that’s still a person, and federal projections expect the profession to grow 22 percent through 2034, far faster than average.
Cloud solutions architect
Nearly every company has moved its servers into Amazon’s, Microsoft’s, or Google’s cloud by now, and each one needs someone who actually understands how to design that system so it doesn’t fall over or rack up a surprise six-figure bill. That’s a cloud solutions architect, and the average salary for the role in the US has climbed to $231,958 a year, with top earners past $350,000.
The job is almost entirely remote-native because the infrastructure itself lives in the cloud, not in any physical office. A cloud architect in Boise can design and manage systems for a company headquartered in Seattle without ever setting foot there, and plenty do exactly that.
What keeps the role out of reach of automation is the sheer number of trade-offs involved in a real architecture decision, cost against speed, security against convenience, one vendor’s quirks against another’s. AI tools can suggest a configuration, but someone still has to own the decision when it goes wrong at 2 a.m. during a traffic spike. Most people land here after several years as a cloud or systems engineer, often picking up an AWS or Azure architect certification along the way, which tends to add a real, measurable bump to the number above.
Corporate counsel
Every company past a certain size needs a lawyer on staff, not at a law firm, reviewing contracts, flagging regulatory risk, and keeping the business out of court before anything gets that far. Median pay across the legal profession as a whole sits at $151,160 a year, and in-house counsel at a mid-sized or larger company routinely lands at or above that figure.
In-house legal work has gone remote faster than almost any other corner of the profession, mostly because the job is built around reading, reviewing, and negotiating documents rather than appearing in a courtroom. A contract review doesn’t care what city the reviewer is sitting in.
The reason this job hasn’t been automated, despite plenty of software promising to review contracts with AI, is liability. Someone has to be willing to put their bar license behind a legal opinion, and a company that gets sued over a bad contract wants a named, licensed human who can explain the decision, not a tool’s output. Corporate counsel roles increasingly specialize by industry, with technology, healthcare, and financial services companies paying a premium for lawyers who already understand the regulatory landscape they’re walking into.
Sales engineer
A sales engineer is the person a software company sends into a deal once the prospect starts asking real technical questions the sales rep can’t answer, questions about whether the product will actually integrate with their system that decide whether a contract gets signed. The median total pay for the role is $156,000 a year, climbing well past $200,000 for senior sales engineers handling the largest accounts.
The role sits in a sweet spot that’s hard to automate. It needs enough technical depth to be credible with an engineering team and enough people skills not to blow up a deal in the room. Companies have tried replacing parts of this job with product demos and documentation, and it hasn’t worked, because the questions that actually block a sale are usually specific to one customer’s weird legacy system, not something a generic demo covers.
Most sales engineers start out as software engineers or support specialists who discover they’re better at explaining a product than building it, or the reverse: salespeople who picked up enough technical fluency to hold their own in a room full of engineers. It’s one of the few technical careers where commission, not just base salary, is doing a lot of the work to push total pay past $150,000.
Telehealth psychiatrist
Psychiatry has a strange reputation for being one of the lower-paid medical specialties, and by physician standards it technically is, but a psychiatrist willing to work through a telehealth platform is still earning serious money for a fully remote job. Average psychiatrist pay across the profession now sits at $331,000 a year, and fully remote telepsychiatry postings routinely offer base salaries at the top of that range.
What makes psychiatry uniquely suited to telehealth, more than most of medicine, is that the core work is conversation and clinical judgment rather than hands-on examination. A psychiatrist can run a full session, prescribe medication, and adjust a treatment plan over video just as effectively as in an office in most cases, and patients in rural areas who’d otherwise have no psychiatric care at all have driven real demand for exactly that.
The mental health shortage in the US is severe enough that remote psychiatry isn’t a consolation prize. For a patient outside a major city, it’s often the only realistic way to see a psychiatrist at all. That shortage is also why the job isn’t going anywhere. Software can screen a patient or draft notes, but prescribing controlled substances and making a diagnosis still legally requires a licensed physician’s signature.
Engineering manager
Somebody has to manage the humans writing the code, not just the code itself, and that job, engineering manager, pays noticeably more than most of the engineers reporting to it. Typical total pay for the role runs from $180,000 to $284,000 a year, with base pay alone often clearing $150,000 before any bonus is added.
The job is a strange hybrid of technical credibility and people management, and that combination is exactly why it hasn’t been automated or outsourced the way some pure coding work has. An engineering manager needs enough technical background to make a real call on architecture decisions and enough emotional intelligence to handle a team member who’s burned out, underperforming, or about to quit. Software can track a sprint board. It can’t have the difficult one-on-one conversation that keeps a good engineer from leaving.
Remote-first engineering teams have made this one of the easier leadership jobs to do from anywhere, since most of the actual work, code review, planning, one-on-ones, happens over video call and chat regardless of where anyone sits. Most engineering managers spend several years as individual contributor engineers first, which means the typical path to this salary runs through years of writing code before anyone hands over a team.
Quantitative research analyst
Hedge funds, trading firms, and increasingly regular banks need people who can build the mathematical models that decide what to buy, sell, or hedge against, and they’ll pay well above $150,000 to get them. The average quantitative research analyst salary is now $184,036 a year, and the top 10 percent clear close to $280,000.
The job demands a level of mathematical and statistical training, usually a graduate degree in a quantitative field, that keeps the talent pool small relative to demand. That’s part of why the pay has stayed high even as AI tools have gotten better at crunching numbers. The other part is that a model making real money decisions with real capital still needs a person accountable for its assumptions, and firms aren’t willing to let that accountability sit with software alone.
Quant work has become steadily more remote-friendly over the past several years as firms outside the traditional Wall Street hubs, fintech startups especially, compete for the same small pool of talent by offering flexibility the old guard wouldn’t. A quant who’s good at the job can work from almost anywhere with a stable connection, building models a trading desk thousands of miles away relies on every day.
Security architect
Somebody has to design the actual blueprint a company’s engineers and analysts follow to keep attackers out, not just react to breaches after they happen, and that’s a security architect’s job. The average salary for the role is $198,825 a year, with senior architects at larger companies clearing well past that.
Cybersecurity as a whole has resisted automation for the obvious reason that attackers are human, creative, and constantly changing tactics, which means defense has to be just as adaptive. A security architect’s job isn’t to run a scanner. It’s to think several moves ahead of an attacker who hasn’t shown up yet, and that kind of adversarial thinking is still squarely a human skill.
The role is one of the more senior destinations in cybersecurity, usually reached after years as a security engineer or analyst, and it tends to be remote-friendly because the actual deliverable is a design document and a set of standards other engineers implement, not hands-on work with physical hardware. Demand has only grown as companies that once treated security as an afterthought have been forced, usually after a costly breach somewhere in their industry, to hire someone whose entire job is thinking about it full time.
VP of sales
Running an entire sales organization is one of the highest-pressure, highest-turnover jobs in corporate America, and it’s compensated like it. Average total pay for a VP of sales is now $329,646 a year, with base salary making up roughly half of that and the rest coming from bonuses and commission tied to the whole team hitting its number.
The job is remote-compatible for the same reason the enterprise sales reps below a VP of sales are. The work is relationship management and strategic planning, both of which happen over video calls and travel, not at a desk in a specific building. Plenty of sales leaders run distributed teams across multiple time zones without a central office at all.
What keeps this job firmly human is accountability. A company’s entire revenue number depends on this person’s decisions about territory, pricing strategy, and who gets hired or fired on the sales team, and boards want someone they can hold personally responsible when the number comes in short, not a dashboard. Average tenure in the role is famously short, often around two years, which is part of why the pay runs so high. Companies are compensating for risk as much as skill.
Data engineer
Every company drowning in data needs someone to actually build the pipelines that move it from where it’s collected to where it’s usable, and that’s a data engineer’s job, distinct from the data scientists who analyze what comes out the other end. Average total pay for the role is now just over $150,000 a year, with senior data engineers at larger tech companies earning considerably more.
The job has become more important, not less, since AI tools arrived, because every machine learning model a company wants to build depends entirely on clean, reliable data getting to it in the first place. Recruiters in the field have a blunt way of putting it: no data engineer, no AI. The pipelines don’t build or maintain themselves.
Remote work fits the role naturally, since the infrastructure being built and maintained is cloud-based rather than physical, and well over half of all data engineering postings now offer remote or hybrid arrangements. Most data engineers come up through computer science or software engineering backgrounds, sometimes after starting in data analytics and realizing they’d rather build the plumbing than interpret what flows through it.
Blockchain engineer
Cryptocurrency’s reputation took a beating over the past several years, but the engineers who build the infrastructure behind blockchain systems, the ledgers, smart contracts, and security layers that have to work perfectly because there’s no undo button once money moves, are still paid accordingly. The average blockchain engineer salary is now $155,000 a year, with senior engineers at established companies earning $195,000 to $220,000 or more.
This is one of the more surprising entries on this list, because so many people assume the crypto hiring boom ended along with the market crashes of recent years. It didn’t disappear. It just got more selective. The speculative projects dried up, but the companies building actual financial infrastructure, payment rails, tokenized assets, institutional custody, kept hiring experienced engineers and paying well for them.
The job demands real expertise in cryptography and distributed systems, areas where a mistake in deployed code can mean an unrecoverable loss of real money, which keeps both the hiring bar and the pay high. Remote work has always been the default in this corner of tech, since blockchain companies are often distributed internationally from day one and have never built their hiring around a physical office.
Technical program manager
Large tech companies run dozens of complex projects at once, each one touching multiple engineering teams, and someone has to be the person tracking dependencies, unblocking teams, and making sure none of it quietly falls apart. That’s a technical program manager, and the average salary for the role is now $162,658 a year, with senior technical program managers averaging over $200,000.
The role requires enough technical background to actually understand what engineering teams are blocked on, not just a project timeline in a spreadsheet, which is why it tends to be filled by former engineers rather than career project managers. That technical credibility is also what keeps the job from being replaced by project management software. A tool can track a deadline. It can’t walk into an engineering team’s standup and figure out why they’re actually behind schedule.
Big tech companies have made this one of the more consistently remote-friendly senior roles, since the coordination work happens across meetings, documents, and chat regardless of time zone. Most technical program managers move into the role after several years as software engineers who discovered they were better at coordinating ten teams than writing one team’s code, which keeps the career path narrower, and the pay higher, than generalist project management.
None of these jobs are easy money, and most took years of training or a specific exam, certification, or license to reach. They’re still proof that six figures and a kitchen-table office aren’t mutually exclusive, even for people who’ve never written a line of code.
