SAFE
Ship engineers spend their shifts inside engine rooms diagnosing vibration, heat, and leaks on diesel propulsion plants, boilers, generators, pumps, and steering gear, then physically repairing them with no shipyard within a thousand miles. AI can already handle the paperwork tier — engine logs, fuel consumption reports, maintenance scheduling, spare-parts requisitions, ISM documentation — and condition-monitoring systems increasingly flag faults before a human does. What does not automate is the licensed engineer standing watch, deciding whether to shut down a failing main engine mid-passage, and signing for it under USCG and STCW authority.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $74,610 → $109,530 +17.4% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+1.6% 8,800 → 9,000 on the projections basis
Hard to automate, and growing
The work resists current AI and the BLS projects +1.6% more of these jobs by 2034. Note that safe does not mean well paid — several of the fastest-growing resistant occupations are among the lowest paid on the register.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~1,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
EngineerDeck EngineerPort EngineerShip EngineerBarge EngineerFerry EngineerHarbor EngineerMarine MechanicVessel EngineerTowboat EngineerTugboat EngineerMaritime EngineerTug Boat EngineerFire Boat EngineerOperating EngineerSmall Boat EngineerTurnaround EngineerMarine Engine MechanicLicensed Marine EngineerEngineering Watch OfficerOperating Marine EngineerEquipment Operating EngineerFire Department Marine EngineerShip Engines Operating Engineer
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Condition-monitoring and planned-maintenance software has genuinely eaten the logging, trending and requisition side of the job, but the core work — crawling a hot engine room to find which of six fuel injectors is misfiring, breaking down a cylinder head at sea, repacking a shaft seal, rewiring a failed starter panel — has no digital substitute, which is why this sits at 15 rather than 18: a real slice of the watch is now screen-and-paperwork.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments The workplace is a moving steel box with 90-plus dB noise, 45°C ambient heat, fuel oil underfoot, and confined-space entries into tanks and crankcases; you go aloft in the stack, into the bilge, and under the floorplates, and nothing about that transfers to a remote operator.
Licensed human required and personally liable USCG-issued engineer officer licences and STCW endorsements are held by the individual, not the vessel, and a Chief or Assistant Engineer's licence can be suspended or revoked in an administrative proceeding after an oil discharge, a machinery casualty, or a false oil record book entry — 33 CFR and the ISM Code both attach responsibility to the named engineering officer on the certificate.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls The call to slow, shut down, or keep running a main engine with rising bearing temperatures 800 miles from land is made by the engineer on watch with incomplete information, and both choices carry real consequences — machinery destruction versus loss of propulsion in a shipping lane — with no supervisor to escalate to before the decision has to be made.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (15/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (16/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (7/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (16/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 39 of this occupation's 73 points (53%).
Embodiment (19/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 85/100, still SAFE.
IMO's non-mandatory MASS Code (target 2028 mandatory) and USCG's rulemaking on autonomous/remotely-operated vessels could codify that a STCW-certificated engineer officer must hold the watch responsibility for machinery even when a shore-based remote operations center is monitoring — i.e. an explicit named 'designated engineer of record' per hull, with certificate endorsement and personal liability under 46 CFR manning rules. Class societies (ABS, DNV) already issue autonomous-notation rules that require an attending engineer signature for unattended machinery space (UMS) certification renewals.
Task-mix shift: this occupation has a clean two-tier structure. If condition-monitoring and AI take the log-keeping, fuel/EEXI-CII reporting, ISM documentation, planned-maintenance scheduling and spares requisitioning tier, the residual role is entirely the judgment/hands tier — mid-ocean fault isolation, improvised repair with onboard stock, shutdown calls. The measured share of the day AI cannot do rises even though AI got better.
If remote-monitoring centers concentrate multiple vessels under one licensed chief (the DNV/Kongsberg ROC model, and Fincantieri/Yara Birkeland-style trials), the individual engineer's call spans several hulls and much larger consequence per decision. A USCG or flag-state rule assigning ROC engineers explicit casualty-response authority — parallel to how NTSB/USCG casualty investigations already name the chief engineer in engine-room fires — would push this to the top of the band.
A P&I club or hull underwriter condition (e.g. an International Group circular) denying or loading coverage on voyages where machinery-space watch is not held by a certificated engineer, following an autonomous-vessel machinery casualty. Insurer warranties of this kind already exist for ice class and for unattended machinery space certification.
Charterer vetting regimes (OCIMF SIRE 2.0 for tankers, RightShip for dry bulk) adding a scored inspection element for engine-department manning depth above statutory minimum, which would make crewed engine rooms a commercial requirement rather than a cost. This is the only realistic route; general buyers of shipping do not pay for human engineers and never will, so the ceiling here is low.
The limit. Embodiment at 19 and task_resistance are near their practical maximum — there is no headroom worth chasing there. The real downside risk is not AI capability but crewing-level deregulation: if flag states permit periodically-unattended or shore-supervised machinery spaces on deep-sea tonnage, headcount falls sharply even though each remaining engineer's score rises. A smaller, more protected occupation is a real possible outcome.
| Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC | 1,420 | $82,370 -25% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 650 | $122,820 +12% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 640 | $129,700 +18% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 580 | $108,900 -1% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 520 | $131,260 +20% |
| Jacksonville, FL | 450 | $130,600 +19% |
| New Orleans-Metairie, LA | 230 | $132,710 +21% |
| Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, LA | 150 | $100,260 -8% |
| New Orleans-Metairie, LA | 230 | $132,710 +21% |
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 60 | $131,640 +20% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 520 | $131,260 +20% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 73. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.