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AI Hiring Index
Live hiring analytics across 257 venture-backed AI companies — from OpenAI and Anthropic to the newest YC batches — read daily, straight from their applicant tracking systems. No scraping middlemen, no stale job boards.
Snapshot: October 6, 2026 · history collected since August 12, 2026
Who is hiring the most
Open roles by company, top 15. Defense AI (Anduril, Shield AI) and infrastructure (Databricks, CoreWeave, Crusoe) out-hire the famous labs.
What roles AI companies hire for
Engineering is 48% of all openings. Sales & GTM is the second-largest function — AI companies are selling hard, not just building.
Not a market for beginners
Junior roles and internships together are 2% of the market. “Mid” means the title carries no seniority marker.
Where the jobs are
73% of locatable roles are in the United States. All of continental Europe adds up to less than London alone.
The office is back
Only 12% of all roles allow full remote. Among companies that state a workplace policy, almost half are strictly on-site.
Based on 6,491 roles with an explicit workplace policy.
Salary transparency: US opens up, EU stays silent
Share of roles with a published salary range. US state laws did their job; in the EU — pay-transparency directive notwithstanding — almost nobody publishes.
US: 3,700 of 10,037 roles · EU: 65 of 762
Median pay, where disclosed
Median midpoint of published annual ranges, USD. Research is the most expensive function at $284k. n = roles with a disclosed range.
Job titles that didn’t exist three years ago
Open roles with AI-era titles. Forward Deployed Engineer — the profession Palantir popularized — has gone mainstream. Prompt Engineer as a standalone job is effectively dead.
Trend: open roles over time
Total open roles across the panel, daily.
Methodology
The panel covers active AI companies from Y Combinator (team size ≥ 10, via the public YC API) plus a curated list from top-fund portfolios (a16z, Sequoia, Index and others). Every job board was validated against the company name; staffing agencies and slug collisions were removed.
Data is read daily, directly from the public APIs of Ashby, Greenhouse, Lever and Workable — the systems these companies actually hire through. Salary figures use only ranges the companies themselves publish. Trends are computed on a stable company cohort: newly added companies enter dynamics from the next quarter.
Limitations: the panel covers startups and scale-ups; Big Tech (Google, Meta, Microsoft) hires through internal systems and is out of scope. Country attribution is derived from posted locations; multi-location roles count once, by primary location.
Use this data
Free to cite and reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Suggested citation:
qikdev AI Hiring Index, qikdev.com/en/ai-hiring-index (accessed October 6, 2026)
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