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GPU programming has to be one of the highest paying jobs in the game industry, and it can transition quite easily into other industries as well. Mostly because it’s not an entry-level position. On top of being a solid C++ developer, you need to understand the entire hardware stack and be able to optimize shaders at the instruction level while juggling things like occupancy, memory coalescing, and other low level performance concerns.

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My experience of it, which is quite substantial both as dev and overseeing whole teams at it, is people do not pay for GPU programming, they do pay for integrating it into their framework, optimizing what the artists did already, and developing profiling tools, but the only part of that remotely competitive with ops related roles is "We didn't think we needed developers so our art team made an inefficient mess in Unreal and we're desperate to release the game on time and are throwing money around to make sure it actually runs on remotely normal hardware", after which they will sit around complaining about how expensive it was and the amount of damage that was done to their artistic vision in the process.

I agree, low-level highly specialized technology roles within game companies do pay well.

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