6 ms·

The AI job market in 2026

67 points by dxs 21d ago

maroonballoon 21d ago
[dead]
orangedog 21d ago
Is it possible to jump into this with a background as a senior dev or is it too late? I don't know where to get started, would you just look like a junior or entry level candidate by doing that?
- lifestyleguru 21d ago
  There are no jobs. For at least two years now most IT/AI hiring ads are fake.
  - ihuman 21d ago
    Do you have a source for that? That's a big accusation
  - irl_zebra 21d ago
    I have multiple Senior AI Engineer roles posted (really, senior / staff SWE who has reps and sets using AI for development, perhaps working with AI infra) right now. Right now it's a lot of getting Claude working well, model routing working well, and getting us off of commercial LLMs. Trying desperately to hire, but get a lot of "AI-pilled" non-developers in the same way I would open SWE roles ten years ago and get constant "Software Bootcamp" grads. These roles exist, in my anecdotal experience of having multiple of these roles open on my team lol. Perhaps this is just 1/100 ads, or 1/1000.
    - lifestyleguru 21d ago
      ...and the job of the hires will be figuring out where AI can be used?
    - luke5441 21d ago
      Sounds more like an ops position to me and less software engineer.
    - tetraodonpuffer 21d ago
      how do you interview for those? I think interviewing has not kept up with how things are, leetcode rounds seem to make even less sense nowadays and feel even more of a hazing ritual. Personally seeing an "AI engineer" job posting I would not even apply, despite having many years experience in general, and experimenting/running models on my own hardware and being responsible at work for several skills, mcp and so on, it just feels that that kind of job is looking for some ex-openai/anthropic/ai-lab kind of skillset, which is not something a lot of people have; if this is what you are looking for of course it is what it is. I think these days being "AI conversant" should be expected for senior/staff positions, it can also be listed a requirement, but not sure putting it as a job title, it feels more like having "IDE staff software engineer" which is not something anybody outside of jetbrains/vs.code would do.
    - logicallee 21d ago
      >getting us off of commercial LLM sounds fun, I had fun fine-tuning some open weights models for local use, and I run a free public inference engine here: https://stateofutopia.com/services/ai/ https://stateofutopia.com/services/ai/ it's fun. where are you planning to run your models?
- cityoften 21d ago
  Maybe - as with most ultra competitive industries you either know someone or have some extremely niche yet hyper productive knowledge others don’t have.
- throwaway20222 21d ago
  We hire “AI engineers,” and honestly the expectation most of the time is that they can demonstrate an actual interest and real work in or with AI. Mind you, we are not a frontier lab, but AI gaming company, and someone with senior dev knowledge is hugely valuable to the team if they actually have rolled up their sleeves and built with AI and push to improve our operations with AI. There isn’t an academic signal that would tell us you are really AI forward, and so much of the engineering job is super charged by having a real dev background for us. I can’t say if this will change of course, and I only speak for a small gaming startup.
  - jdlshore 21d ago
    Given the backlash amongst gamers against AI, how does being an “AI gaming” company work?
    - rideontime 21d ago
      It only works if one measures their success in Twitter likes.
    - Founderarcstone 21d ago
      I look forward to this and the new technology that advances for Ai gaming.
    - ramesh31 21d ago
      >Given the backlash amongst gamers against AI, how does being an “AI gaming” company work? They are delusional or know nothing about how development works. I can promise you there's not a single major game studio left out there not leveraging AI in significant parts of their workflows at this point.
  - lolakutty 21d ago
    Building with AI does not interest me. Someone please tell me where the fun in that is?
    - 21d ago
- peezd 21d ago
  Absolutely; I'd check out AI Engineering by Chip Huyen to get a fundamental understanding of the space and do a couple of side projects in the area to get familiar and be able to speak to the nuances of working with LLMs, and that will be enough to start working to transition and apply for relevant roles.
- vanuatu 21d ago
  I did by applying most eng roles at frontier companies don't require prior experience specifically with AI, there's a ton of regular engineering work required to train / serve models
- ramesh31 21d ago
  >Is it possible to jump into this with a background as a senior dev or is it too late? This stuff has only existed for 3 years. Everyone is faking it and no one really knows what's right or wrong yet. You're more than qualified.
- dgellow 21d ago
  It’s for sure not too late, why would it be? The industry is young and evolving. It’s not even clear what an AI job is exactly, the definition and job titles have been changing a lot
pauletienney 21d ago
> Will AI replace developers? The Stanford data shows a tilt toward seniority rather than mass displacement: entry for 22 to 25 year olds is suffering, older workers are growing. WEF expects a net gain of 78 million jobs by 2030. As a 42 years old web developper, this situation gives me headaches. I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened. I feel we will need much less developpers and yet I can imagine some years where a developper will be able to handle much larger projects.
- vouaobrasil 21d ago
  > I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened. In some ways, having a superpower is not all that great because then you are forced by the prisoner's dilemma to use it. And if you think about it, it comes at a cost: a higher mental strain over a long period of time. To use a physical analogy: a workout machine at the gym is very likely to assist you in targeting specific muscles compared to just lifting stuff you need to lift, but it also allows you to push that specific muscle group harder and thus increase the chances of injury to that muscle group precisely because it's so targeted. I think AI is like that with the brain. (I'll add that it's perfectly possible to work out safely at the gym with lots of equipment. But I've spent years at the gym and I've seen a ton of injuries because the temptation to push a specific muscle group hard is there. And, AI is much worse because with AI, there is an economic incentive to push harder, whereas at the gym it's in your best interest to dial back...only sometimes people like to show off to their gym buddies.)
  - stephen_cagle 21d ago
    I wonder if LLM's might be closer to the weight belt in terms of lifting? It is a tool that lets you exceed your unassisted limits. If you kept doing the other things you would be no worse for using it, but if you only train with it I am not sure you would be a very well rounded lifter. The weight belt lets you do a few lifts better, at potentially the cost of being weaker than would be required if you did that left unassisted? Might be a bad metaphor honestly. Aside (shower thought): A little of a tangent, but I have always felt that the weight belt is kind of odd in that it has become completely accepted to use one for the deadlift and squat. Like, why did we decide that this one form of brace is acceptable but others enhancements are not "real" weightlifting? Why not an incline plane? Why not a pulley? I'm not at all arguing for or against the usage of the weight belt. I just find it odd that it has become so accepted; seems curious how we decided to draw the line here and not there.
vouaobrasil 21d ago
I would like to have a resource, or maybe a coalition of companies that sign up and offer jobs that are guaranteed not to use AI. Although it might be true that there are some new jobs that didn't exist before, it would be great for people to band together to create a system that promotes the human element over using AI.
- AnotherGoodName 21d ago
  At this point that’s like asking to work at an artisanal hand made goods factory. Not common and I’m not even sure there’s particular demand on the consumer side for artisanal hand crafted code despite the negativity towards AI.
  - pmg101 21d ago
    It's worse even than that. Although I personally wouldn't pay for a bespoke hand designed piece of furniture I can at least see that it is an artisan piece and understand the rationale. Software is all shit anyway, it just helps me get a job done. How would artisanal software even distinguish itself. Leave the visual appearance aside. I mean the functionality.
    - lolakutty 21d ago
      >How would artisanal software even distinguish itself. artisanal software is software that has a bound on the complexity. A human has to reason about it.
    - vouaobrasil 21d ago
      Well for one, a lot of people now solo dev a project with AI and then often seem to abandon the project. There's not much sense of owndership in some of it. I try and use software that has as little AI influence as possible.
      - AnotherGoodName 21d ago
        I have so many abandoned projects before ai. In fact these days i’m returning to the and finishing them off.
lifestyleguru 21d ago
> The median ML engineer in Germany earns 70,000 euros. The numbers are stuck at 2018 levels. Accumulated inflation since then is over 20%. This bubble is not glamorous at all.
- ferris-booler 21d ago
  > an AI engineer in the US at 146,000 to 189,000, a median of 70,000 euros in Germany, 111,000 francs in Zurich. Interested to hear from European HNers: does this sound accurate? I know EU pay bands are lower than US but a 50% cut even after adjusting for currency feels brutal. Also curious why the Swiss number is so much higher?
  - ffsm8 21d ago
    I'm German and it'd say it's plausible for median. Switzerland basically still has a middle class, that's why their wages are where they're. While my wage has significant improved over the last years, statistics show that wages have been stagnating for 20 years and inequality keeps rising. Obviously a lot less pronounced then in the USA, but still significantly more then in eg Switzerland. The difference is even bigger if you look at current valuation of chf, it's almost $140k or 120k€ Though you should keep in mind that Germany has a pretty strong social security system. Not a benefit if you're a working adult, but it explains some of the difference
    - lifestyleguru 20d ago
      > Though you should keep in mind that Germany has a pretty strong social security system. Not a benefit if you're a working adult, but it explains some of the difference Germany has so many billionaires that literally every minor region has their own local billionaire and locals feel proudly represented by him/her. Yet the "strong social security system" is almost fully financed by employed people paying over 40% cut from their monthly payslip.
      - ffsm8 19d ago
codechicago277 21d ago
Pangram flags this post as 100% AI
- rogerrogerr 21d ago
  Don’t need any tool to identify this as slop: > Here is the short version, with numbers and links. > The one-paragraph summary:
- visarga 21d ago
  > In AI Engineer postings the skill "prompt engineering" appears 8.9% of the time, RAG 13.6%. *The skill stayed, the job dissolved into other roles*. That is Claude vibe. I thought it was an ok article when I was about half way through it, then hit this. And overall it seems like it could have been more focused, it listed various AI roles a bit carelessly.
timr 21d ago
this reads like AI slop.
- ill_ion 21d ago
  [dead]
ill_ion 21d ago
[dead]
password54321 21d ago
Mostly title inflation. Using GPT API does not make you an "AI engineer". I don't even know if anyone would seriously call themselves this. Usually they are either software developers that actually work at an AI company or a researcher. The others are mostly fake jobs. I'm pretty sure people suddenly had BS like "Blockchain engineer" in their linkedin headline in 2022. Edit: https://openai.com/careers/search/?q=Engineer https://openai.com/careers/search/?q=Engineer Most jobs involving engineering don't even have AI included in their title at OpenAI, though they do have Applied AI engineers and AI support engineers. I highly doubt these other companies suddenly have a huge growth of AI engineering jobs available.
- vanuatu 21d ago
  I interview a lot of larping 'AI engineers' that either vibe coded a side project or were involved in low stakes pilots Irl theres a short list of companies that actually build / apply ai at scale. for people trying to break in its usually not expected to have experience with it, just don't lie about it
vjvjvjvjghv 21d ago
I am glad that I just retired. I find AI super fascinating but navigating a SW development career in the next few years looks like a daunting task.
vanuatu 21d ago
ai slop article, but if you want to maximize earnings in any tech boom the best opportunities lie at the companies driving that boom.
sigbottle 21d ago
What's the best way to get into any kind of frontier training or inference? Obviously OpenAI and Anthropic would be great, but I would love to work at inference literally anywhere. LLMs are super cool and I want more systems problems. Or is the boat sailed and it's too hard to get in? My current issue is that solo learning and bootstrapping is hella expensive money wise and my current job doesn't pay that much either.
y-c-o-m-b 21d ago
These lists must be hallucinating. > AI Engineer. Number one on LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise in the US two years running, number one at Robert Half. About 1,550 new US postings a week, median 176,000 dollars. This is the engineer who puts LLMs into products: RAG, agents, fine-tuning, evaluation. I'm doing all those things. The RAG work was interesting, but putting it on my resume has done nothing. Nobody is hiring. I have recent multi-year FAANG experience too. Before 2023 I could blast out 10 resumes and get at least 8 or so hits with multiple offers. Now I can send out 100 resumes and lucky if I get a single rejection letter. I am seeing the same thing reported by other white-collar working people like HR reps and project managers in all industries. There is definitely a stealth recession/depression scenario playing out right now and has been for at least the last two years.
AndrewKemendo 21d ago
> That is exactly what working with small and mid-size businesses looks like: find the process where AI pays off, build the agent or the integration, and get it to the people who will use it. This is exactly right. I’m making good side money from building and integrating “AI” with small business tools. Custom CRMs and tracking solutions so they don’t have to buy salesforce etc… Notably this doesn’t reliably work for juniors, which supports the article. You need to already have experience making enterprise scale software, otherwise you’re going to miss some massive authentication or data exposure problem. I anticipate the return of the software consulting company like initech, but instead of having Tom and Milton and Samir and Peter etc…, you only have Lumburgh and Michael Bolton.

67 points by dxs 21d ago

[dead]

Is it possible to jump into this with a background as a senior dev or is it too late? I don't know where to get started, would you just look like a junior or entry level candidate by doing that?

lifestyleguru 21d ago
There are no jobs. For at least two years now most IT/AI hiring ads are fake.
- ihuman 21d ago
  Do you have a source for that? That's a big accusation
- irl_zebra 21d ago
  I have multiple Senior AI Engineer roles posted (really, senior / staff SWE who has reps and sets using AI for development, perhaps working with AI infra) right now. Right now it's a lot of getting Claude working well, model routing working well, and getting us off of commercial LLMs. Trying desperately to hire, but get a lot of "AI-pilled" non-developers in the same way I would open SWE roles ten years ago and get constant "Software Bootcamp" grads. These roles exist, in my anecdotal experience of having multiple of these roles open on my team lol. Perhaps this is just 1/100 ads, or 1/1000.
  - lifestyleguru 21d ago
    ...and the job of the hires will be figuring out where AI can be used?
  - luke5441 21d ago
    Sounds more like an ops position to me and less software engineer.
  - tetraodonpuffer 21d ago
    how do you interview for those? I think interviewing has not kept up with how things are, leetcode rounds seem to make even less sense nowadays and feel even more of a hazing ritual. Personally seeing an "AI engineer" job posting I would not even apply, despite having many years experience in general, and experimenting/running models on my own hardware and being responsible at work for several skills, mcp and so on, it just feels that that kind of job is looking for some ex-openai/anthropic/ai-lab kind of skillset, which is not something a lot of people have; if this is what you are looking for of course it is what it is. I think these days being "AI conversant" should be expected for senior/staff positions, it can also be listed a requirement, but not sure putting it as a job title, it feels more like having "IDE staff software engineer" which is not something anybody outside of jetbrains/vs.code would do.
  - logicallee 21d ago
    >getting us off of commercial LLM sounds fun, I had fun fine-tuning some open weights models for local use, and I run a free public inference engine here: https://stateofutopia.com/services/ai/ https://stateofutopia.com/services/ai/ it's fun. where are you planning to run your models?
cityoften 21d ago
Maybe - as with most ultra competitive industries you either know someone or have some extremely niche yet hyper productive knowledge others don’t have.
throwaway20222 21d ago
We hire “AI engineers,” and honestly the expectation most of the time is that they can demonstrate an actual interest and real work in or with AI. Mind you, we are not a frontier lab, but AI gaming company, and someone with senior dev knowledge is hugely valuable to the team if they actually have rolled up their sleeves and built with AI and push to improve our operations with AI. There isn’t an academic signal that would tell us you are really AI forward, and so much of the engineering job is super charged by having a real dev background for us. I can’t say if this will change of course, and I only speak for a small gaming startup.
- jdlshore 21d ago
  Given the backlash amongst gamers against AI, how does being an “AI gaming” company work?
  - rideontime 21d ago
    It only works if one measures their success in Twitter likes.
  - Founderarcstone 21d ago
    I look forward to this and the new technology that advances for Ai gaming.
  - ramesh31 21d ago
    >Given the backlash amongst gamers against AI, how does being an “AI gaming” company work? They are delusional or know nothing about how development works. I can promise you there's not a single major game studio left out there not leveraging AI in significant parts of their workflows at this point.
- lolakutty 21d ago
  Building with AI does not interest me. Someone please tell me where the fun in that is?
  - 21d ago
peezd 21d ago
Absolutely; I'd check out AI Engineering by Chip Huyen to get a fundamental understanding of the space and do a couple of side projects in the area to get familiar and be able to speak to the nuances of working with LLMs, and that will be enough to start working to transition and apply for relevant roles.
vanuatu 21d ago
I did by applying most eng roles at frontier companies don't require prior experience specifically with AI, there's a ton of regular engineering work required to train / serve models
ramesh31 21d ago
>Is it possible to jump into this with a background as a senior dev or is it too late? This stuff has only existed for 3 years. Everyone is faking it and no one really knows what's right or wrong yet. You're more than qualified.
dgellow 21d ago
It’s for sure not too late, why would it be? The industry is young and evolving. It’s not even clear what an AI job is exactly, the definition and job titles have been changing a lot

pauletienney 21d ago

> Will AI replace developers? The Stanford data shows a tilt toward seniority rather than mass displacement: entry for 22 to 25 year olds is suffering, older workers are growing. WEF expects a net gain of 78 million jobs by 2030. As a 42 years old web developper, this situation gives me headaches. I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened. I feel we will need much less developpers and yet I can imagine some years where a developper will be able to handle much larger projects.

vouaobrasil 21d ago
> I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened. In some ways, having a superpower is not all that great because then you are forced by the prisoner's dilemma to use it. And if you think about it, it comes at a cost: a higher mental strain over a long period of time. To use a physical analogy: a workout machine at the gym is very likely to assist you in targeting specific muscles compared to just lifting stuff you need to lift, but it also allows you to push that specific muscle group harder and thus increase the chances of injury to that muscle group precisely because it's so targeted. I think AI is like that with the brain. (I'll add that it's perfectly possible to work out safely at the gym with lots of equipment. But I've spent years at the gym and I've seen a ton of injuries because the temptation to push a specific muscle group hard is there. And, AI is much worse because with AI, there is an economic incentive to push harder, whereas at the gym it's in your best interest to dial back...only sometimes people like to show off to their gym buddies.)
- stephen_cagle 21d ago
  I wonder if LLM's might be closer to the weight belt in terms of lifting? It is a tool that lets you exceed your unassisted limits. If you kept doing the other things you would be no worse for using it, but if you only train with it I am not sure you would be a very well rounded lifter. The weight belt lets you do a few lifts better, at potentially the cost of being weaker than would be required if you did that left unassisted? Might be a bad metaphor honestly. Aside (shower thought): A little of a tangent, but I have always felt that the weight belt is kind of odd in that it has become completely accepted to use one for the deadlift and squat. Like, why did we decide that this one form of brace is acceptable but others enhancements are not "real" weightlifting? Why not an incline plane? Why not a pulley? I'm not at all arguing for or against the usage of the weight belt. I just find it odd that it has become so accepted; seems curious how we decided to draw the line here and not there.

vouaobrasil 21d ago

I would like to have a resource, or maybe a coalition of companies that sign up and offer jobs that are guaranteed not to use AI. Although it might be true that there are some new jobs that didn't exist before, it would be great for people to band together to create a system that promotes the human element over using AI.

AnotherGoodName 21d ago
At this point that’s like asking to work at an artisanal hand made goods factory. Not common and I’m not even sure there’s particular demand on the consumer side for artisanal hand crafted code despite the negativity towards AI.
- pmg101 21d ago
  It's worse even than that. Although I personally wouldn't pay for a bespoke hand designed piece of furniture I can at least see that it is an artisan piece and understand the rationale. Software is all shit anyway, it just helps me get a job done. How would artisanal software even distinguish itself. Leave the visual appearance aside. I mean the functionality.
  - lolakutty 21d ago
    >How would artisanal software even distinguish itself. artisanal software is software that has a bound on the complexity. A human has to reason about it.
  - vouaobrasil 21d ago
    Well for one, a lot of people now solo dev a project with AI and then often seem to abandon the project. There's not much sense of owndership in some of it. I try and use software that has as little AI influence as possible.
    - AnotherGoodName 21d ago
      I have so many abandoned projects before ai. In fact these days i’m returning to the and finishing them off.

lifestyleguru 21d ago

> The median ML engineer in Germany earns 70,000 euros. The numbers are stuck at 2018 levels. Accumulated inflation since then is over 20%. This bubble is not glamorous at all.

ferris-booler 21d ago
> an AI engineer in the US at 146,000 to 189,000, a median of 70,000 euros in Germany, 111,000 francs in Zurich. Interested to hear from European HNers: does this sound accurate? I know EU pay bands are lower than US but a 50% cut even after adjusting for currency feels brutal. Also curious why the Swiss number is so much higher?
- ffsm8 21d ago
  I'm German and it'd say it's plausible for median. Switzerland basically still has a middle class, that's why their wages are where they're. While my wage has significant improved over the last years, statistics show that wages have been stagnating for 20 years and inequality keeps rising. Obviously a lot less pronounced then in the USA, but still significantly more then in eg Switzerland. The difference is even bigger if you look at current valuation of chf, it's almost $140k or 120k€ Though you should keep in mind that Germany has a pretty strong social security system. Not a benefit if you're a working adult, but it explains some of the difference
  - lifestyleguru 20d ago
    > Though you should keep in mind that Germany has a pretty strong social security system. Not a benefit if you're a working adult, but it explains some of the difference Germany has so many billionaires that literally every minor region has their own local billionaire and locals feel proudly represented by him/her. Yet the "strong social security system" is almost fully financed by employed people paying over 40% cut from their monthly payslip.
    - ffsm8 19d ago

codechicago277 21d ago

Pangram flags this post as 100% AI

rogerrogerr 21d ago
Don’t need any tool to identify this as slop: > Here is the short version, with numbers and links. > The one-paragraph summary:
visarga 21d ago
> In AI Engineer postings the skill "prompt engineering" appears 8.9% of the time, RAG 13.6%. *The skill stayed, the job dissolved into other roles*. That is Claude vibe. I thought it was an ok article when I was about half way through it, then hit this. And overall it seems like it could have been more focused, it listed various AI roles a bit carelessly.

timr 21d ago

this reads like AI slop.

ill_ion 21d ago
[dead]

ill_ion 21d ago

[dead]

password54321 21d ago

Mostly title inflation. Using GPT API does not make you an "AI engineer". I don't even know if anyone would seriously call themselves this. Usually they are either software developers that actually work at an AI company or a researcher. The others are mostly fake jobs. I'm pretty sure people suddenly had BS like "Blockchain engineer" in their linkedin headline in 2022. Edit: https://openai.com/careers/search/?q=Engineer https://openai.com/careers/search/?q=Engineer Most jobs involving engineering don't even have AI included in their title at OpenAI, though they do have Applied AI engineers and AI support engineers. I highly doubt these other companies suddenly have a huge growth of AI engineering jobs available.

vanuatu 21d ago
I interview a lot of larping 'AI engineers' that either vibe coded a side project or were involved in low stakes pilots Irl theres a short list of companies that actually build / apply ai at scale. for people trying to break in its usually not expected to have experience with it, just don't lie about it

vjvjvjvjghv 21d ago

I am glad that I just retired. I find AI super fascinating but navigating a SW development career in the next few years looks like a daunting task.

vanuatu 21d ago

ai slop article, but if you want to maximize earnings in any tech boom the best opportunities lie at the companies driving that boom.

sigbottle 21d ago

What's the best way to get into any kind of frontier training or inference? Obviously OpenAI and Anthropic would be great, but I would love to work at inference literally anywhere. LLMs are super cool and I want more systems problems. Or is the boat sailed and it's too hard to get in? My current issue is that solo learning and bootstrapping is hella expensive money wise and my current job doesn't pay that much either.

y-c-o-m-b 21d ago

These lists must be hallucinating. > AI Engineer. Number one on LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise in the US two years running, number one at Robert Half. About 1,550 new US postings a week, median 176,000 dollars. This is the engineer who puts LLMs into products: RAG, agents, fine-tuning, evaluation. I'm doing all those things. The RAG work was interesting, but putting it on my resume has done nothing. Nobody is hiring. I have recent multi-year FAANG experience too. Before 2023 I could blast out 10 resumes and get at least 8 or so hits with multiple offers. Now I can send out 100 resumes and lucky if I get a single rejection letter. I am seeing the same thing reported by other white-collar working people like HR reps and project managers in all industries. There is definitely a stealth recession/depression scenario playing out right now and has been for at least the last two years.

AndrewKemendo 21d ago

> That is exactly what working with small and mid-size businesses looks like: find the process where AI pays off, build the agent or the integration, and get it to the people who will use it. This is exactly right. I’m making good side money from building and integrating “AI” with small business tools. Custom CRMs and tracking solutions so they don’t have to buy salesforce etc… Notably this doesn’t reliably work for juniors, which supports the article. You need to already have experience making enterprise scale software, otherwise you’re going to miss some massive authentication or data exposure problem. I anticipate the return of the software consulting company like initech, but instead of having Tom and Milton and Samir and Peter etc…, you only have Lumburgh and Michael Bolton.