AI hiring leaderboard — which roles are growing?
Monthly ranking of AI hiring across 15 role families. Two views: top by volume (which roles have the most open AI positions) and top by growth (which roles are heating up month-over-month).
Anchor: 2026-09 (last full calendar month, vs prior month 2026-08). 5,042 AI hiring events in 2026-09 (WORLDWIDE) vs 4,513 in 2026-08.
Top by volume
Most-hired AI role families in the WORLDWIDE view. Ranked by event count.
| # | Role family | Events | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI Software Engineer | 1,241 | +4% |
| 2 | AI Hardware / Silicon | 452 | -8% |
| 3 | Corporate Operations | 348 | +27% |
| 4 | AI Product Manager | 344 | +20% |
| 5 | Solutions Architect | 269 | -3% |
| 6 | Agentic AI | 264 | +33% |
| 7 | AI Engineer | 224 | +68% |
| 8 | Solutions Engineer | 214 | +15% |
| 9 | ML Engineer | 210 | +21% |
| 10 | MLOps / AI Infrastructure | 182 | +34% |
| 11 | Generative AI | 179 | +14% |
| 12 | Account Executive | 174 | -2% |
| 13 | Forward Deployed Engineer | 155 | -7% |
| 14 | Research Scientist | 155 | +35% |
| 15 | Applied Scientist | 124 | +68% |
Top by growth
Fastest-heating AI role families. New entrants (prior month = 0) sort to the top. Ranked by month-over-month change.
| # | Role family | Change | Events |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI Operations / Annotation | +136% | 33 |
| 2 | AI Engineer | +68% | 224 |
| 3 | Applied Scientist | +68% | 124 |
| 4 | Computer Vision | +53% | 23 |
| 5 | Research Scientist | +35% | 155 |
| 6 | MLOps / AI Infrastructure | +34% | 182 |
| 7 | Agentic AI | +33% | 264 |
| 8 | Corporate Operations | +27% | 348 |
| 9 | ML Engineer | +21% | 210 |
| 10 | AI Product Manager | +20% | 344 |
| 11 | Solutions Engineer | +15% | 214 |
| 12 | Generative AI | +14% | 179 |
| 13 | Recruiting / Talent | +11% | 124 |
| 14 | Data Engineer (AI) | +8% | 40 |
| 15 | AI Software Engineer | +4% | 1,241 |
Methodology
-
AI-only: events filtered to
ai_tierIN ('strong', 'medium') -- excludes weak/no-signal hiring entirely. - Monthly anchor: "current" = 2026-09 (last full calendar month), "prior" = 2026-08. Today's partial month is excluded so growth comparisons aren't biased by an incomplete denominator.
- Role bucketing: a keyword dictionary mapping titles to a bounded set of role families. Ordered priority: AI Safety beats generic engineer; ML Engineer beats generic software; back-office hires (Recruiting, Corporate Operations) captured honestly as AI-economy signal, not silenced.
- "Other AI" excluded from the leaderboard: a substantial minority of AI-tagged titles don't map to any defined bucket (one-off titles, unique role names). They count toward the total but don't appear as a leaderboard row -- if they did, "Other AI" would always be #1 by volume and tell readers nothing useful.
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Methodology and source list available at /methodology .