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: 2026-07 (last full calendar month, vs prior month 2026-06). 2,379 AI hiring events in 2026-07 (US) vs 2,173 in 2026-06.
Top by volume
Most-hired AI role families in the US view. Ranked by event count.
| # | Role family | Events | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI Software Engineer | 662 | +9% |
| 2 | Corporate Operations | 221 | +18% |
| 3 | AI Product Manager | 195 | -4% |
| 4 | AI Hardware / Silicon | 191 | +12% |
| 5 | Research Scientist | 104 | +55% |
| 6 | Generative AI | 88 | +31% |
| 7 | Solutions Architect | 87 | +16% |
| 8 | Solutions Engineer | 85 | +13% |
| 9 | Agentic AI | 77 | -19% |
| 10 | Account Executive | 71 | -17% |
| 11 | Applied Scientist | 67 | +56% |
| 12 | MLOps / AI Infrastructure | 67 | +20% |
| 13 | ML Engineer | 66 | -25% |
| 14 | Recruiting / Talent | 62 | -29% |
| 15 | AI Safety / Alignment | 55 | -4% |
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 | Forward Deployed Engineer | +77% | 53 |
| 2 | Applied Scientist | +56% | 67 |
| 3 | Research Scientist | +55% | 104 |
| 4 | AI Designer | +35% | 23 |
| 5 | Generative AI | +31% | 88 |
| 6 | Data Engineer (AI) | +22% | 28 |
| 7 | Robotics / Embodied AI | +21% | 46 |
| 8 | AI Engineer | +21% | 35 |
| 9 | Data Scientist (AI) | +20% | 42 |
| 10 | MLOps / AI Infrastructure | +20% | 67 |
| 11 | Corporate Operations | +18% | 221 |
| 12 | Solutions Architect | +16% | 87 |
| 13 | Solutions Engineer | +13% | 85 |
| 14 | AI Hardware / Silicon | +12% | 191 |
| 15 | AI Software Engineer | +9% | 662 |
Methodology
-
AI-only: events filtered to
ai_tierIN ('strong', 'medium') -- excludes weak/no-signal hiring entirely. - Monthly anchor: "current" = 2026-07 (last full calendar month), "prior" = 2026-06. 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 .