The Prompt Engineer is a profile that emerged with LLMs, responsible for designing, testing and improving prompts (the instructions given to generative AI models) to get reliable, safe and reproducible answers within a given product.
The work: writing system instructions, choosing the examples to give the model, structuring expected outputs, building test sets to compare versions and documenting what works. It combines an understanding of models, product sense, experimental rigor and writing quality.
The title still exists, but the role has largely merged into broader jobs: AI Engineer, AI Product Manager, domain specialists who design assistants. Dedicated positions are mostly found in AI labs and companies whose product relies entirely on a model.
Why it matters when hiring
Hiring a standalone "Prompt Engineer" is rarely the right answer: you usually need someone who can also code, integrate and evaluate, in other words an AI Engineer. If you do hire for this role, test the method, not the intuition: ask how the candidate proves one prompt is better than another, on how many cases, with which criteria.