Instrumentation and electrical. You keep the automation running on well sites and central facilities, and when something quits at two in the morning it is your phone that rings. Good money, real skill, and a seat the big operators hire directly...which is exactly why none of them will tell you what it pays.
We read the North Dakota I&E and field service technician postings we could find. Not one of them contains a wage. The major operators and midstream companies that hire for this seat do not publish pay.
Job sites fill that silence with their own estimate. One of them showed an annual range in the thirties for a Bakken I&E technician at a major operator, which is not a number anybody working this basin would recognise. It was generated by a model, not typed by an employer.
So this page has no pay figure. When a Bakken employer prints one, it goes here with their name next to it. Everything below comes from the actual job descriptions, which are unusually detailed even when the pay is not there.
Worth understanding, because it is a pattern across this whole basin and it costs people money.
The small local outfits out here print real wages. Hot oil, hydrovac, winch, mechanic...those postings say $28 to $35 an hour right on the ad, because a small company competing for a driver has to.
The majors and the midstream companies do not. They post six thousand words about values, benefits and career growth, and no number anywhere. They do not have to compete on the ad, because the name does the work.
That means the roles most likely to pay well are the ones you can research the least. Do not read the silence as bad news, and do not read a job site's estimate as information. Ask in the interview and get a number before you go further.
You are the reason the automation works. From the descriptions:
You work with operations, engineering, specialists and leads, and you spend a high percentage of your time working alone.
These are written into the posting and they are worth reading before you apply:
That last one catches people. A residency radius means you are moving before you start, not commuting in from Bismarck.
Note what is not on that list. No CDL, no degree requirement, no oilfield background stated as mandatory. If you have industrial electrical or instrumentation experience from another industry, this is one of the more transferable seats in the patch.
Two different worlds, and they run differently.
Both are long career seats. Automation and instrumentation work does not disappear when the rig count drops, because the wells still have to run.
If you work I&E in the Bakken, or you hire for it, we would rather print a real number than leave this blank. Tell us what the seat actually pays and it goes up.
Tell Us What It Pays →Duties, requirements and working conditions come from reading North Dakota I&E and field service technician postings in full.
The pay section is empty on purpose. No employer posting we read printed a wage for this role. We are not going to fill that gap with a job site's estimate or a national average, because a number that describes nowhere is worse than no number.
Every wage figure elsewhere on this site comes from a North Dakota posting with the company and town printed next to it. When one exists for I&E, it will appear here the same way.
The postings behind this page were read in August 2026. What is here is a reading from that month, not a promise of what any company posts today.
We post a fresh North Dakota board every week, and we read the descriptions so you do not have to. Free.
Every one of these is a real seat in this basin, paying what the company said it pays. Never worked the patch before? Start with how to get an oilfield job with no experience.
Work one of these seats? Tell us what you actually make. Your name, email and company are never published, and nothing goes public until a seat has 5 reports behind it.