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NLP Engineer

Also known as: Natural Language Processing Engineer · Conversational AI Engineer

Builds software that understands and generates human language, such as chatbots and search.

B.TechMCAAI & MLCSE
Starting salary · freshersfrom ₹2.9–11.8 lakh/yr1Typical pay in the first year (0–1 yr experience)

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₹2.9–11.8 lakh/yr
Salary 0–1 yr · 2024
PayScale India, Entry-Level Machine Learning Engineer with Natural Language Processing (NLP) Skills salary (as reported)
What’s wrong?

No sign-in needed. Our team checks reports before any number changes.

See salary by experience below
B.Tech / MCA; an M.Tech or MS is common in research-heavy roles
Typical entry

What you’d do

An NLP engineer builds software that works with human language, such as chatbots, search, translation and text classification. Product companies, AI startups, IT services firms and research labs hire them. A day involves preparing text data, training or fine-tuning language models, evaluating results and integrating them into products.

  • Trains and fine-tunes language models
  • Prepares and cleans text datasets
  • Builds text search and chat features
  • Evaluates output quality

How you get in

Fresher NLP roles are limited. Many people enter as ML or software engineers and move into language work. Projects such as fine-tuning a model, building a retrieval system or contributing to open source help show the skill.

Salary in India

By experience

₹ lakh a year · bars show the typical range, low to high

0–1 yr · Fresher
₹2.9–11.8L1

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₹2.9–11.8 lakh/yr
Salary 0–1 yr · 2024
PayScale India, Entry-Level Machine Learning Engineer with Natural Language Processing (NLP) Skills salary (as reported)
What’s wrong?

No sign-in needed. Our team checks reports before any number changes.

Fresher salary over the years

middle of the 0–1 yr range, ₹ lakh a year

Fewer than two years of fresher data so far — the trend shows once there are two.

Skills you’ll use

From our guide · a curated list is coming

  • Python and machine learning fundamentals
  • Working with language models and embeddings
  • Text preprocessing and evaluation metrics
  • Building retrieval and search pipelines
  • Handling Indian-language and multilingual data

About this field · for freshers

Job openings by year

Is demand growing?

Not added yet.

Competition3

How many graduates enter each year?

~8.2 lakh
new graduates a year from B.Tech / B.E. (all branches)

B.Tech / B.E. (all branches) graduates in 2023-24 at institutions that reported to AISHE — everyone finishing that degree, not only those entering this role.

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~8.2 lakh
Competition
AISHE 2023-24, Table 34 (programme-wise out-turn), Ministry of Education · 2023-24
What’s wrong?

No sign-in needed. Our team checks reports before any number changes.

Who hires

IT firms, banks, government, startups?

Not added yet.

Where the jobs are

Which cities?

Not added yet.

Women in the field3

Is it diverse?

30%

Share of women among B.Tech / B.E. (all branches) graduates in 2023-24 — the entry degree, not people already working in this role.

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30%
Women in the field
AISHE 2023-24, Table 34 (programme-wise out-turn), Ministry of Education · 2023-24
What’s wrong?

No sign-in needed. Our team checks reports before any number changes.

At a glance

  • The field changes quickly as large language models evolve.
  • Common next roles: senior NLP or ML engineer, applied scientist, AI team lead.
  • Research-heavy roles often expect a postgraduate degree or publications.

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