AI Hiring Index · frozen 2026-10-01
AI Hiring Index, October 2026
9,222 open roles at 80 AI companies on 1 October 2026, 5,035 of them technical. The largest technical family is Software Eng (1,531 openings); the skill technical postings name most is Python (49%).
This is the first issue; month-over-month changes start with the next one.
Technical role families
Open postings per family; posted base = medians of the published lower and upper bounds, shown when at least 10 postings publish pay.
| Family | Open | Share | Posted base | Pay disclosed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software Eng | 1,531 | 17% | $190K–$275K | 59% |
| Infra / Hardware | 1,093 | 12% | $198K–$290K | 53% |
| FDE / Applied | 1,086 | 12% | $182K–$250K | 42% |
| Security | 301 | 3% | $220K–$314K | 68% |
| Research Engineer | 232 | 3% | $211K–$400K | 62% |
| AI / ML Engineer | 185 | 2% | $200K–$342K | 59% |
| Inference / Perf | 182 | 2% | $200K–$330K | 55% |
| Evals / Data | 165 | 2% | $210K–$320K | 45% |
| Research Scientist | 163 | 2% | $225K–$373K | 49% |
| Safety / Policy | 97 | 1% | $245K–$315K | 74% |
What technical postings ask for
Share of 5,035 technical postings that mention each skill.
| Skill | Share, as a bar | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Python | 49% | |
| LLMs | 24% | |
| Kubernetes | 20% | |
| Go | 15% | |
| Evals | 15% | |
| C++ | 12% | |
| TypeScript | 12% | |
| Rust | 8% | |
| RAG / retrieval | 7% | |
| PyTorch | 7% | |
| RL / post-training | 7% | |
| Prompting | 7% | |
| Fine-tuning | 4% | |
| Distributed training | 4% | |
| CUDA / Triton | 3% | |
| vLLM / SGLang / TensorRT | 3% | |
| JAX | 2% | |
| PhD | 2% | |
| MCP | 2% |
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