Skill · AI Hiring Index · as of 2026-10-05
PhD in AI job postings
2% of technical postings at the AI companies we track mention PhD (102 postings). Research Scientist postings ask for it most: 30%.
Technical postings that mention it
2%
102 postings
Which roles ask for it
Share of each technical role family's open postings that mention PhD.
| Role family | Share, as a bar | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Research Scientist | 30% | |
| Research Engineer | 8% | |
| Security | 2% | |
| AI / ML Engineer | 2% | |
| Inference / Perf | 2% | |
| Safety / Policy | 1% | |
| Software Eng | 1% | |
| Evals / Data | 1% | |
| FDE / Applied | 0% | |
| Infra / Hardware | 0% |
Companies asking for it most
| Company | Postings | Of its technical postings |
|---|---|---|
| Field AI | 12 | 14% |
| Databricks | 9 | 2% |
| OpenAI | 7 | 1% |
| Anthropic | 7 | 2% |
| Applied Intuition | 6 | 3% |
| Periodic Labs | 6 | 25% |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 6 | 14% |
| Mistral AI | 6 | 5% |
| Cohere | 4 | 5% |
| Scale AI | 4 | 4% |
How to learn it
No pick yet — Not something to learn: postings that ask for one often add "or equivalent experience" — published work and open-source contributions are what that means.