AI Hiring Index, week of 2026-09-27
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Writer is hiring at 17x its usual pace (50 roles in 7 days). 1,140 new roles were posted in the last 7 days across 277 AI companies. Last full week: 894 new roles, down 7% on the prior 4-week average.
57 leadership openings, 4 new-region expansions, 13 companies opened a new function.
Accelerating
- Shield AI: 98 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 44.5 (586 open)
- Writer: 50 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 3.0 (51 open)
- Harvey: 39 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 23.2 (299 open)
- Waymo: 33 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 21.2 (356 open)
- CoreWeave: 32 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 19.8 (305 open)
- Legora: 32 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 20.2 (277 open)
- xAI: 30 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 14.0 (275 open)
- Graphcore: 19 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 10.0 (176 open)
Shareable: the fastest-hiring AI companies this week and this week's leadership openings.
Slowing
- Wayve: 9 new vs 20.0 average
- Fluidstack: 7 new vs 15.0 average
- Saronic: 6 new vs 12.2 average
- DataSnipper: 2 new vs 4.2 average
- DeepL: 2 new vs 5.2 average
Salary index
8,792 open roles list a base-salary range. Median posted range for research roles: $207k to $328k; engineering: $185k to $263k. Full tables: https://aihiringindex.com/salaries?utm_source=newsletter; one page per company and per role: https://aihiringindex.com/salary/?utm_source=newsletter
Skills in demand
Named most often in this week's open descriptions: Python (28.0%), LLMs (15.1%), Agents (13.9%), AWS (10.9%), Robotics (10.1%), Kubernetes (10.0%). By function and company: https://aihiringindex.com/skills?utm_source=newsletter; one page per skill with the companies asking for it: https://aihiringindex.com/skill/?utm_source=newsletter
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Leadership openings
- Recursion: Executive Director, Clinical Pharmacology/Pharmacometrics, Remote Opportunity - United Kingdom; Remote Opportunity - United States, £136k–167k
- Enveda: Clinical Development Director, Remote, United States, $330k–370k
- Shield AI: Deputy Chief Engineer, X-BAT, Seattle, Washington, $250k–350k
- Epirus: Director of Systems Engineering, Torrance, California, United States, $248k–276k
- Generate Biomedicines: Director, Wet Lab Engineering, Somerville, MA, $189k–260k
- Dust: Global Head of Solutions Engineering, New York, $275k–350k
- Anthropic: Head of Business Technology Engineering, San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY, $485k–625k
- Turing: Director of Information Security, United States
- 49 more in Pro
Expansions
- AirOps opened its first role in UK & Ireland: Sales Development Representative - EMEA
- RunPod opened its first role in Asia-Pacific: Forward Deployed Engineer APAC
- Ema opened its first role in Canada: Software Engineer, Full-Stack
- Arize AI opened its first role in Latin America: DevOps Support Engineer (Argentina)
New functions
- Motional started hiring in Data: Director of Data Science
- Assort Health started hiring in Research: Research Engineer
- OpusClip started hiring in Data: Data Scientist
- Dropzone AI started hiring in Operations: Director of HR
- Modal started hiring in Data: Analytics Engineer
Contraction watch
- Databricks: closing faster than opening (105 closed, 33 new in 7 days)
- Crusoe: closing faster than opening (98 closed, 36 new in 7 days)
- Anthropic: closing faster than opening (87 closed, 43 new in 7 days)
- 56 more in Pro
In this week's Pro brief
7 companies started accelerating (Commure, CoreWeave, Legora, Sierra...), every one of the 57 leadership seats by function, time to fill for 132 companies, net headcount adds, and the closed-roles table. Members got it this morning; start a trial to get next Monday's.
This week by function
Engineering 298, Go-to-market 265, Operations 248, Infrastructure 162, Research 65, Product & Design 56, Data 25, Other 21
Full tables, closed roles with time-to-fill, company scorecards and CSV exports: AI Hiring Index Pro, $149/month.
Browse all 14,748 open roles at https://aihiringindex.com. Hiring? Feature a role.
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