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Role · AI Hiring Index · as of 2026-10-05

Software Engineer jobs at AI companies

Databricks (166) and OpenAI (163) lead 1,529 open Software Engineer roles across 78 AI companies. 9% are remote and 58% are in the Bay Area.

Software engineers at AI companies build the same things as anywhere — product, platform, infrastructure — around a model at the centre: serving it, putting it in front of users, and building the tools researchers train it with.

Every engineering organisation: product, platform and infrastructure, developer productivity, research tooling.

Demand this month

Open roles
1,529
17% of all openings
New in the last 7 days
1,529
Remote
9%
Bay Area
58%
Hiring mostOpen roles
Databricks166
OpenAI163
Applied Intuition135
Anthropic70
CoreWeave65
Crusoe59
Harvey50
Nebius42
xAI40
Field AI36

What Software Engineer postings ask for

Share of 1,529 open postings that mention each skill.

SkillShare, as a barShare
Python46%n=709
Kubernetes20%n=311
Go19%n=297
C++19%n=289
TypeScript18%n=270
LLMs15%n=234
Rust10%n=146
Evals7%n=103
RAG / retrieval5%n=84
Prompting4%n=66
RL / post-training3%n=53
PyTorch2%n=36
CUDA / Triton2%n=29
Distributed training2%n=29
MCP2%n=26
vLLM / SGLang / TensorRT1%n=17
JAX1%n=12
PhD1%n=12
Fine-tuning1%n=11

Posted base pay

Median posted range $189K–$275K base, from 893 postings that publish pay (58% of this role's openings). This is the base range a posting advertises — not total compensation, which adds equity and bonus; for that, Levels.fyi is the reference.

Midpoint of each posted base range, in thousands of US dollars: <150: 57; 150–200: 192; 200–250: 258; 250–300: 138; 300–350: 104; 350–400: 90; 400–450: 44; 450+: 10

Half of the posted ranges have their midpoint between $195K and $308K; the median midpoint is $235K.

What to learn

What you can skip

All of it is your existing job. The difference is context: expect to work next to model behaviour (latency, cost, non-determinism) and to use AI tools in your own work.

The gaps, in the order these postings ask for them

Kubernetes · 20% of postings

Project: Deploy your agent where a customer would run it — Package the agent as a container, deploy it to a local cluster with its secrets, a health probe and resource limits, then kill a node and watch what happens.

TypeScript · 18% of postings

  • The TypeScript Handbook free

    The language's own reference, short enough to read in an evening — enough to read and change the web and SDK code these roles ship to customers.

Project: Type an SDK for an API you use — Write a small typed client for a real API — request and response types, errors as values, one streaming endpoint — and publish it with its tests.

LLMs · 15% of postings

  • Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT — Andrej Karpathy free

    Three and a half hours from tokens to RLHF, from one of OpenAI's founding members — the mental model every later choice rests on.

  • AI Engineering — Chip Huyen · O'Reilly paid

    Chapter 2 is this skill — training data, architecture, post-training, sampling — for people who build on models; the rest is the AI Engineer track at length: evals, RAG, agents, cost.

Project: Ship one LLM feature end to end — Structured output with schema validation, streaming, a fallback model, and per-request cost and latency logged — then write down the numbers.

Evals · 7% of postings

Project: An eval harness that gates a change — Label 100 real outputs by hand, build an LLM judge and measure its agreement with you, and make CI fail when a prompt or model change drops the score.

One project

Put a model behind a real interface — Build a small service that calls a model with streaming, retries, rate limits and cost tracking, and a UI on top — the plumbing every team here owns some of.

The full learning map

Open Software Engineer roles

See all 1,542 postings

Posted demand, not hires: open postings on the public job boards of the AI companies we track, read every night. A repost counts once; a role family is assigned from the title; skill tags are checked against the postings every month and a skill below 90% precision is not shown; pay is the posted base range, shown only when at least 10 postings publish it. How we count.