Explore jobs
Find specific jobs
Explore careers
Explore professions
Best companies
Explore companies
The differences between chief engineers and chief architects can be seen in a few details. Each job has different responsibilities and duties. Additionally, a chief architect has an average salary of $168,836, which is higher than the $108,050 average annual salary of a chief engineer.
The top three skills for a chief engineer include HVAC, plumbing and customer service. The most important skills for a chief architect are cloud, infrastructure, and digital transformation.
| Chief Engineer | Chief Architect | |
| Yearly salary | $108,050 | $168,836 |
| Hourly rate | $51.95 | $81.17 |
| Growth rate | 2% | 21% |
| Number of jobs | 88,473 | 98,518 |
| Job satisfaction | - | - |
| Most common degree | Bachelor's Degree, 49% | Bachelor's Degree, 66% |
| Average age | 41 | 44 |
| Years of experience | 6 | - |
A chief engineer is responsible for monitoring the engineering department's overall operations, ensuring performance efficiency, and everyone's strict compliance with the safety standards and regulatory procedures. Chief engineers manage the distribution of the tasks to the team, communicate with the clients and management for instructions and specifications, monitor expenses and forecast sales reports, analyze and approve designs, negotiate contracts, and process disputes. A chief engineer must have excellent knowledge of the engineering disciplines and exemplary leadership skills to handle the team's performance towards the company's objectives.
Chief architects are C-level executives in information technology (IT) who look at IT functions that may be centralized for seamless collaboration. They are also called enterprise architects who design and manage the software release team base on the scrum/agile development methodologies. Their job involves systems analysis, and they project plan in transitioning the Internet operation of MCI to wireless and cable platforms. Also, they offer a disaster recovery solution for a virtual or physical server to a data center in the cloud.
Chief engineers and chief architects have different pay scales, as shown below.
| Chief Engineer | Chief Architect | |
| Average salary | $108,050 | $168,836 |
| Salary range | Between $65,000 And $177,000 | Between $111,000 And $255,000 |
| Highest paying City | Palo Alto, CA | San Francisco, CA |
| Highest paying state | California | Washington |
| Best paying company | BGC Partners | Zscaler |
| Best paying industry | Transportation | Retail |
There are a few differences between a chief engineer and a chief architect in terms of educational background:
| Chief Engineer | Chief Architect | |
| Most common degree | Bachelor's Degree, 49% | Bachelor's Degree, 66% |
| Most common major | Mechanical Engineering | Computer Science |
| Most common college | Michigan Technological University | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Here are the differences between chief engineers' and chief architects' demographics:
| Chief Engineer | Chief Architect | |
| Average age | 41 | 44 |
| Gender ratio | Male, 96.2% Female, 3.8% | Male, 92.7% Female, 7.3% |
| Race ratio | Black or African American, 3.5% Unknown, 4.6% Hispanic or Latino, 9.9% Asian, 10.2% White, 71.7% American Indian and Alaska Native, 0.1% | Black or African American, 6.2% Unknown, 4.7% Hispanic or Latino, 8.8% Asian, 12.0% White, 67.7% American Indian and Alaska Native, 0.5% |
| LGBT Percentage | 5% | 11% |