Where hardware meets software: chips, embedded systems and the code that runs on them. Many never bother with the licence.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Mid-career
$100,000
New grad
$70,000
Senior or staff engineer
$150,000
US tech companies with Canadian offices, such as Nvidia, Intel and Apple, pay well above this range. Waterloo and Toronto grads who move to the US can double it.
$65,000 to $85,000
New graduate, hardware or software role
Big tech new-grad offers in Canada start around $90,000 to $110,000 before stock. Co-op students earn $22 to $40 an hour, more at US companies.
$130,000 to $200,000+
Senior, staff and principal engineers
Chip design and machine learning hardware are the best paid specialties. Stock at large companies can add $30,000 to $100,000 a year on top.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a four year engineering degree at the cheapest provincial tuition with no professional licence, which most computer engineers never need because software and hardware roles rarely require it. The high end is four years at Waterloo or Toronto, which charge at the top of the range, plus registration as an engineer in training, the professional practice exam and a first annual licence. Co operative work terms at those same schools pay the highest wages in the country and offset much of the tuition. Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees, so the floor is unavoidably high.
Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees. Waterloo and Toronto computer engineering charge at the top end, but co-op earnings there are also the highest.
Stock or RSUs (restricted stock units, company shares you receive over time)
Standard at large tech companies and startups.
Remote or hybrid work
Normal for software roles, less so for hardware labs.
Learning budgets and conferences
Pension
Only at government, defence and utilities. Tech companies match savings instead.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A degree, then a choice: licence or not.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Advanced Functions, Calculus, Physics and Chemistry are required. Marks in the low 90s at Waterloo and Toronto, high 80s elsewhere.
Accredited computer engineering degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
A four-year Bachelor of Engineering or Applied Science at a school accredited by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board. Circuits, digital logic, operating systems and a lot of programming.
Co-op and internships
During school
Employers care more about what you have built and where you interned than your marks. Waterloo runs six work terms.
First job
Final year
Most grads take a hardware, firmware or software job and never register with a regulator.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence, optional
4 years, if you choose to
About 4 years as an EIT (engineer-in-training) plus an ethics exam. Worth it if you design safety-critical hardware for medical, power or avionics, or want to use the title engineer.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required.
Physics
Required. You will do a lot of circuits.
Chemistry
Required at most schools.
Computer science
Not required, but a big head start. Learn Python or C before you arrive.
Anyone can write firmware or design a circuit board for a living. The title engineer is legally protected, so unlicensed grads are called developers or hardware designers instead. Alberta made an exception in late 2023 so anyone there can use the title software engineer. Provincial regulators such as PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario) license those who want the P.Eng (professional engineer), and it matters for medical devices, power electronics and anything that can hurt someone. Most computer engineering grads in tech skip it and lose nothing.
Computer engineering is offered at most engineering schools. The ones employers name most:
Ontario
Waterloo (the co-op pipeline to US tech), Toronto, McMaster, Queen's, Carleton, Ottawa.
Quebec
McGill, Polytechnique Montréal, Concordia.
West
UBC (University of British Columbia), Alberta, Calgary, Manitoba.
Atlantic
Dalhousie, Memorial.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Chip and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) design
The scarcest hardware skill. AMD (a chip company) in Markham and Ciena in Ottawa hire for it.
Embedded and real-time systems
Cars, medical devices and aircraft all run on this. BlackBerry QNX (an operating system for cars) is built in Ottawa.
Machine learning hardware and systems
Making AI models run fast on chips. Very well paid right now.
Cloud certifications
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, if you go the software route.
A GitHub with real projects
Something you built and finished beats a high average.
Hackathons and robotics teams
Free, fun, and a good first resume line.
Arduino, Raspberry Pi, a soldering iron
Shows you actually like hardware.
Hardware co-ops, not just software
Fewer students want them, so they are easier to get and stand out later.
A large share of Waterloo and Toronto computer engineering grads take jobs in California, Seattle or Texas. A work permit is easy for Canadian engineers under the free trade agreement, and pay is often double. The trade-offs: US health insurance, being far from home, and visa status tied to your employer. Many come back to Toronto or Vancouver after a few years.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Hardware roles: simulating a circuit or chip design in the morning, debugging a prototype board on a lab bench with an oscilloscope in the afternoon, writing test firmware in between. Software roles look like any developer's day: a stand-up meeting, hours of coding and code review, some meetings. Firmware sits between the two, with a lot of time reading chip datasheets.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Mike Lazaridis founded Research In Motion in Waterloo in 1984 while still an engineering student, weeks before he would have graduated. Its BlackBerry phones once ran the world's business email.
ATI (a graphics chip maker) was founded in Markham, Ontario, in 1985 and grew into one of the two big names in graphics chips. AMD (a chip company) bought it in 2006, and the Markham site is still one of the largest chip design centres in Canada.
Computer engineering is an accredited engineering degree with physics, circuits and an iron ring. Computer science is a math and theory degree in the science faculty. Both get software jobs. Only one can design the chip.
Geoffrey Hinton's lab at the University of Toronto did the work in 2012 that set off the deep learning boom. The chips that run it are what many computer engineers now design and optimize.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students.