AI jobs in Belgium: which roles exist, what do they do and what do they earn?

"Something in AI" is, in 2026, one of the most sought-after and least understood career directions. Behind the term lies a whole range of roles, each with different daily work, a different profile and a different salary. Based on the vacancies on ai-job.be and the salary ranges they contain, we list the main roles.

The landscape in numbers

Of the more than 400 active AI vacancies in Belgium, 39% fall under AI engineering, 31% under data science, 22% under data engineering and 6% under machine learning in the strict sense; MLOps, NLP, computer vision and AI policy together make up the rest. Employers are broader than just tech companies: banks and insurers, consultancy firms, government bodies, retail, pharma and industry are all recruiting.

The roles

Data engineer

What: building and maintaining data flows that reliably move raw data from systems into a data warehouse or a model. Pipelines, quality checks, scalability. Skills: SQL, Python or Scala, Spark, cloud platforms (Azure Data Factory, AWS Glue, Databricks), orchestration (Airflow). Salary: 3,400 to 4,200 euros gross per month for a junior, 4,500 to 6,000 euros for a mid-level to senior, usually with a company car or mobility budget. This is the most accessible entry point for those coming from software development.

Data scientist

What: translating business questions into analyses and models: predicting which customers will leave, which machines will fail, which price works. Plenty of exploration, statistics and communication. Skills: statistics, Python (pandas, scikit-learn), SQL, visualisation, and the ability to explain a result to someone without a maths background. Salary: 3,300 to 4,000 euros junior, 4,300 to 5,800 euros senior. See also which training for an AI job: here, maths and statistics weigh more heavily than computer science.

Machine learning engineer / AI engineer

What: building and training models, and above all bringing them into production: integrating them into applications, running them at scale, monitoring them. Increasingly since 2023: building applications on top of large language models (retrieval, agents, evaluation). Skills: strong software development in Python, frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), APIs, cloud, containers, and for LLM work the ecosystems around it. Salary: 3,600 to 4,400 euros junior, 4,800 to 6,500 euros senior; the highest ranges on this list, certainly at scale-ups and financial institutions.

MLOps engineer

What: the infrastructure and processes that allow models to move reliably from experiment to production and keep working there: version control of data and models, automatic retraining, monitoring, cost management. Skills: DevOps (CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform), cloud, and enough ML knowledge to understand what can go wrong. Salary: comparable to senior data engineering, 4,500 to 6,200 euros. A scarce profile; few vacancies, but also few candidates.

NLP and computer vision specialist

What: specialised models for text (document processing, chatbots, translation) or images (inspection, medical imaging, surveillance). Skills: in-depth knowledge of the models in that domain, often a master's degree or PhD with research experience. Salary: 4,000 to 6,500 euros, depending on experience and sector (pharma and defence pay more).

AI product owner, business analyst, consultant

What: deciding what gets built and why, translating between business and team, selecting use cases, guiding change. Almost 40% of AI vacancies include such a profile. Skills: domain knowledge, project management, enough technical insight to set realistic goals, communication. Salary: 3,500 to 4,500 euros junior, 4,500 to 6,500 euros senior, often with a variable component in consultancy.

AI governance, ethics and compliance

What: applying the European AI Regulation (AI Act): risk classification, documentation, oversight. A young role with legal, technical and organisational aspects. Profile: lawyers, compliance officers and data experts who have retrained. Salary: 3,800 to 5,500 euros, rising as the regulation comes into force.

What determines the salaries

• Production experience. Building a model is different from keeping it running for two years. The latter pays better.
• Sector. Banks, insurers and pharma pay 10 to 20% more than consultancy and government, but more often require five days in the office.
• Cloud certifications and experience with the major platforms.
• Languages. In Brussels and at international employers, English is the working language; for customer-facing roles, Dutch plus French remains an advantage.
• The package. Company car, group insurance and remote work make up 15 to 25% of the total; compare with the salary guide from ai-job.be, which calculates salaries per AI role based on vacancies with a salary range.

How to get started

Choose a role that fits your strengths: if you enjoy building, go into engineering; if you enjoy solving questions, go into data science; if you enjoy organising, go into product and analysis. Build a portfolio with real data, even if it's small. Use the skills radar to see which skills the vacancies in your direction require and which ones you're missing. And follow the listings on ai-job.be by category; AI vacancies tend to stay online for a short time on average, and the employers that appear on there repeatedly are the teams that are growing.