AI Hiring Index, week of 2026-09-28
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Writer is hiring at 17x its usual pace (50 roles in 7 days). 1,304 new roles were posted in the last 7 days across 286 AI companies. Last full week: 1081 new roles, up 14% on the prior 4-week average.
74 leadership openings, 5 new-region expansions, 13 companies opened a new function.
Accelerating
- Shield AI: 102 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 44.5 (589 open)
- Writer: 50 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 3.0 (51 open)
- Crusoe: 47 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 31.2 (347 open)
- Harvey: 41 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 23.2 (293 open)
- Waymo: 37 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 21.0 (359 open)
- CoreWeave: 36 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 19.8 (307 open)
- Legora: 36 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 19.8 (273 open)
- xAI: 32 new roles vs a prior weekly average of 13.8 (289 open)
Shareable: the fastest-hiring AI companies this week and this week's leadership openings.
Slowing
- Wayve: 9 new vs 19.8 average
- Skydio: 3 new vs 11.0 average
- Scale AI: 2 new vs 10.2 average
- Together AI: 2 new vs 5.8 average
- DeepL: 1 new vs 5.2 average
Salary index
8,952 open roles list a base-salary range. Median posted range for research roles: $200k to $320k; 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 (13.8%), AWS (11.0%), Robotics (10.5%), Kubernetes (10.1%). 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
- Generate Biomedicines: Director, Clinical Scientist (Respiratory indications), Remote, $186k–270k
- 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
- Cursor: Regional Director, Forward Deployed Engineering - India, Bengaluru; New Delhi; Mumbai
- 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–284k
- Dust: Global Head of Solutions Engineering, New York, $275k–350k
- 66 more in Pro
Expansions
- Enveda opened its first role in US: Clinical Development Director
- 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
- Tennr started hiring in Data: Data Engineer
- Dropzone AI started hiring in Product & Design: Senior Technical Writer
- Motional started hiring in Data: Director of Data Science
- Assort Health started hiring in Research: Research Engineer
- Dropzone AI started hiring in Operations: Senior Director of HR
Contraction watch
- Databricks: closing faster than opening (121 closed, 39 new in 7 days)
- Crusoe: closing faster than opening (106 closed, 47 new in 7 days)
- Harvey: closing faster than opening (88 closed, 41 new in 7 days)
- 57 more in Pro
In this week's Pro brief
1 companies started accelerating (Crusoe), every one of the 74 leadership seats by function, time to fill for 136 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 328, Go-to-market 299, Operations 284, Infrastructure 194, Research 76, Product & Design 64, Other 31, Data 28
Full tables, closed roles with time-to-fill, company scorecards and CSV exports: AI Hiring Index Pro, $149/month.
Browse all 14,953 open roles at https://aihiringindex.com. Hiring? Feature a role.
Past issues: https://aihiringindex.com/reports/