Skill · AI Hiring Index · as of 2026-10-05
LLMs in AI job postings
24% of technical postings at the AI companies we track mention LLMs (1,203 postings). AI / ML Engineer postings ask for it most: 73%.
Technical postings that mention it
24%
1,203 postings
Which roles ask for it
Share of each technical role family's open postings that mention LLMs.
| Role family | Share, as a bar | Share |
|---|---|---|
| AI / ML Engineer | 73% | |
| Research Scientist | 58% | |
| Research Engineer | 55% | |
| FDE / Applied | 42% | |
| Inference / Perf | 22% | |
| Safety / Policy | 20% | |
| Security | 15% | |
| Software Eng | 15% | |
| Evals / Data | 13% | |
| Infra / Hardware | 4% |
Companies asking for it most
| Company | Postings | Of its technical postings |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | 162 | 33% |
| Anthropic | 129 | 39% |
| Databricks | 90 | 16% |
| Mistral AI | 63 | 53% |
| Scale AI | 59 | 56% |
| Nebius | 41 | 19% |
| Cohere | 38 | 49% |
| Harvey | 33 | 33% |
| LangChain | 31 | 61% |
| Sierra | 30 | 41% |
How to learn it
- 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.