The employer pays the published petition charges and bears the internal cost of assembling the technical and immigration-history records. Premium processing is available for a separate published fee.
The engineer's time is the budget line that matters
Take the filing fees from the USCIS fee schedule at the time of filing. The larger commitment is internal and technical. Someone with real knowledge of the control logic has to gather dated versions, establish who wrote what, assemble field results and draft the comparison with commercially available systems, and that person is usually the busiest engineer in the company.
Reconstructing an employee's prior U.S. admissions also takes time, particularly where records are old or a previous employer has to be contacted. Add translation costs for anything not in English, and the affiliate's own set-up expenses where the site is new.
Then add a contingency for a request for further evidence, which is common where a first submission describes an experienced technician rather than a specialized-knowledge position.