How many AI engineer jobs are open?
On November 13, 2026, 2,436 AI engineer jobs were open at the 853 companies we track, which is about one of every eleven engineering jobs on those companies' careers pages. They were spread across 387 companies, so close to half of the companies had at least one.
An "AI engineer job" here means a job ad in engineering or data with AI, machine learning, ML or LLM in the title, next to the word engineer, developer or architect. "Senior AI Engineer" counts. So does "Machine Learning Engineer, Radar" at Stripe and "Software Engineer, ML Platform" at Cursor. An LLM is a large language model, the kind of AI behind chatbots.
The count has barely moved in a month. At the 446 companies we could compare week by week, AI engineer jobs went from 1,398 on October 13 to 1,373 on November 13, a drop of 1.8%. Other engineering jobs at those same companies fell 2.8%, from 9,777 to 9,508. So I would call this strong and steady demand, but I would not call it a boom, because nothing in the last month looks like a rush.
| Date | AI engineer jobs | Other engineering jobs | AI share |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 13 | 1,398 | 9,777 | 12.5% |
| October 20 | 1,406 | 9,774 | 12.6% |
| October 27 | 1,380 | 9,744 | 12.4% |
| November 3 | 1,367 | 9,699 | 12.4% |
| November 10 | 1,385 | 9,553 | 12.7% |
| November 13 | 1,373 | 9,508 | 12.6% |
| Source: Hiring Tempo counts from company careers pages, 2026. |
The share is higher in that table (12.6%) than across all 853 companies (9.2%) because the 446 are the companies we have tracked the longest, and that group leans toward software and AI companies.
Which companies have the most AI engineer jobs?
NVIDIA has the most by a wide margin, with 160. Ten companies hold 652 of the 2,436 jobs, which is about a quarter, and the list mixes chip makers, software companies, AI labs and a rocket company.
| Company | AI engineer jobs | All open jobs |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA | 160 | 2,000 |
| ServiceNow | 83 | 799 |
| SpaceX | 70 | 2,847 |
| OpenAI | 68 | 828 |
| Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 56 | 1,778 |
| Waymo | 52 | 379 |
| Oracle | 44 | 2,840 |
| GE Vernova | 42 | 2,176 |
| Databricks | 41 | 904 |
| Intel | 36 | 856 |
| Source: Hiring Tempo counts from company careers pages. We read at most 2,000 jobs from NVIDIA's page, so its real totals may be higher. |
ServiceNow added the most in the month. It had 57 AI engineer jobs on October 13 and 83 on November 13, and the count rose in every weekly check in between. Its total job count grew too, from 696 to 799, so AI roles are part of a wider hiring push there.
OpenAI went from 56 to 68 while its total stayed close to flat (808 to 828). Most of its AI engineer ads carry the title Applied AI Engineer. That is a job where you help a customer build something with the company's AI models, and it sits close to the forward deployed engineer job we wrote about last week. Across all companies, 207 ads use "Applied AI" in the title.
Waymo stands out for a different reason. It has 52 AI engineer jobs out of 379 in total, so about one in seven of its open jobs is an AI engineer role.
What do AI engineer jobs pay?
Among the 291 AI engineer ads that list a yearly pay range in US dollars, the middle range runs from $200,000 to $287,500. For other engineering jobs on the same careers pages, the middle range runs from $180,000 to $263,000, based on 2,572 ads. So the AI ads start about $20,000 higher and top out about $24,500 higher.
"Middle" means the median: half of the ads list a lower number and half list a higher one.
Those figures are far above the national number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median pay for software developers at $135,980 a year as of May 2025. Part of the gap comes from who shows pay, because only 12% of the AI engineer ads we track list it at all, and they come from fewer than 100 companies. OpenAI, Zoox and Snowflake alone account for 80 of them. These are also posted ranges, which is what a company says it might pay, and not what anyone was paid.
The ads that show pay are mostly in places that require it, such as California and New York. Our guide to pay transparency laws by state lists them.
Where are the jobs, and how senior are they?
About 63% of the AI engineer jobs (1,538) are in the United States. India has 180, Canada 141 and the United Kingdom 130.
Inside the US, the San Francisco Bay Area dominates. San Francisco has 409 of the jobs, Santa Clara has 169 and Mountain View has 96. New York City is second among single cities with 187, and Seattle has 87.
Remote work is a little more common than in the rest of engineering. About 14% of AI engineer ads (339) are marked remote, compared with 10% of other engineering ads.
The jobs lean senior. About 62% of the AI engineer titles include a word like senior, staff, principal or lead, compared with 55% of other engineering titles. Intern, new grad and junior titles make up about 5% in both groups, which is 120 AI engineer jobs. If you are early in your career, our count of entry-level tech jobs shows where those are.
Who this count leaves out
It leaves out anyone doing AI work under a plain title. Plenty of "Software Engineer" and "Research Scientist" jobs at AI companies are AI jobs, and a title search cannot see them. Anthropic shows only 25 AI engineer jobs by this method out of 673 open jobs, and that tells you about its job titles, not about how much AI work it has.
It also counts ads, not hires. One ad can stand for several openings, and a filled job can stay listed for weeks.
The companies we track are mostly technology companies and large employers with public careers pages, so this is not a count of every AI engineer job in the country. The long-run picture comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which projects that software developer jobs will grow 10% from 2025 to 2035, compared with 3% for all jobs, and names AI as one of the reasons. It projects 22% growth for computer and information research scientists, a small field of 38,600 jobs whose work includes building new AI tools.
How we counted
Hiring Tempo reads the public careers pages of 853 companies every day. For this article we took every job ad open on November 13, 2026 that we sort into engineering or data and whose title has AI, ML, LLM, machine learning, artificial intelligence, generative or deep learning in it, along with engineer, developer or architect. The month-over-month numbers use only the 446 companies whose pages we read without errors on all six dates in the first table. Pay figures use ads with a yearly range in US dollars. One company in the comparison group, Disney, had a page-reading problem during the month that removed 11 AI engineer jobs from our count, so the true change is slightly smaller than the 1.8% drop shown.
The most common exact title among all 2,436 ads is Senior Machine Learning Engineer, with 33.
Sources
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers, last modified August 27, 2026
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Computer and Information Research Scientists, last modified August 27, 2026
- Hiring Tempo daily counts from company careers pages, October 13 to November 13, 2026