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AI Engineering Job Market: Skills, Trends, and Employers

Skills, trends, employers, and locations from 6,964 real AI engineering job postings, aggregated from 8 monthly scrapes of builtin.com. Data through August 2026.

Alexey Grigorev August 25, 2026 3 min read
Field Guide AI Engineering

The AI engineering job market, measured. Here are 6,964 AI engineering job postings from builtin.com, aggregated for the AI Engineering Field Guide. The postings come from 8 monthly scrapes (Feb 4, 2026 to Aug 25, 2026). We break them into skill demand, monthly trends, top employers, and job locations.

The skills employers ask for

Each category lists the skills that appear most often in the latest scrape of Aug 25, 2026 (1,222 postings). A skill's share is the percentage of postings that mention it. A skill is counted once per posting, and only when the description spells it out, so shares are a floor, not a ceiling.

GenAI

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

LLMs 716 postings (58.6%)
RAG 528 postings (43.2%)
Agentic Workflows 513 postings (42.0%)
Prompt Engineering 477 postings (39.0%)
AI Agents 438 postings (35.8%)
Generative AI 302 postings (24.7%)
LangChain 289 postings (23.6%)
LLM Evaluation 262 postings (21.4%)
Embeddings 223 postings (18.2%)
MCP 215 postings (17.6%)

Languages

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

Python 844 postings (69.1%)
TypeScript 230 postings (18.8%)
Java 209 postings (17.1%)
SQL 193 postings (15.8%)
JavaScript 136 postings (11.1%)
Go 130 postings (10.6%)
C++ 91 postings (7.4%)
C# 81 postings (6.6%)
Node.js 53 postings (4.3%)
.NET 39 postings (3.2%)

Cloud

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

AWS 497 postings (40.7%)
Azure 387 postings (31.7%)
GCP 303 postings (24.8%)
AWS Bedrock 86 postings (7.0%)
AWS Lambda 73 postings (6.0%)
Vertex AI 71 postings (5.8%)
SageMaker 58 postings (4.7%)
AWS S3 52 postings (4.3%)
Azure OpenAI 49 postings (4.0%)
IAM 37 postings (3.0%)

ML

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

Machine Learning 347 postings (28.4%)
PyTorch 187 postings (15.3%)
Model Evaluation 158 postings (12.9%)
TensorFlow 141 postings (11.5%)
Deep Learning 110 postings (9.0%)
Model Training 102 postings (8.3%)
scikit-learn 90 postings (7.4%)
Hugging Face 82 postings (6.7%)
Fine-Tuning 67 postings (5.5%)
Transformers 57 postings (4.7%)

Databases

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

Vector Databases 243 postings (19.9%)
PostgreSQL 142 postings (11.6%)
Pinecone 93 postings (7.6%)
Snowflake 73 postings (6.0%)
Vector Search 72 postings (5.9%)
NoSQL 63 postings (5.2%)
Weaviate 61 postings (5.0%)
SQL 58 postings (4.7%)
MongoDB 56 postings (4.6%)
Knowledge Graphs 54 postings (4.4%)

Ops

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

CI/CD 481 postings (39.4%)
Docker 329 postings (26.9%)
Kubernetes 309 postings (25.3%)
Observability 211 postings (17.3%)
MLOps 185 postings (15.1%)
Monitoring 184 postings (15.1%)
Git 165 postings (13.5%)
Terraform 121 postings (9.9%)
Distributed Systems 110 postings (9.0%)
Infrastructure as Code 101 postings (8.3%)

Data

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

Data Pipelines 205 postings (16.8%)
Databricks 77 postings (6.3%)
Kafka 71 postings (5.8%)
Spark 65 postings (5.3%)
Airflow 47 postings (3.8%)
Pandas 47 postings (3.8%)
Data Modeling 44 postings (3.6%)
Data Engineering 38 postings (3.1%)
NumPy 29 postings (2.4%)
dbt 20 postings (1.6%)

Web

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

APIs 319 postings (26.1%)
REST APIs 255 postings (20.9%)
Microservices 181 postings (14.8%)
React 181 postings (14.8%)
FastAPI 129 postings (10.6%)
OAuth 48 postings (3.9%)
Flask 47 postings (3.8%)
Node.js 40 postings (3.3%)
Next.js 39 postings (3.2%)
Angular 34 postings (2.8%)

Domains

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

NLP 109 postings (8.9%)
Computer Vision 55 postings (4.5%)
Robotics 3 postings (0.2%)
CFD 2 postings (0.2%)
Reinforcement Learning 2 postings (0.2%)
CAE 1 postings (0.1%)
Causal Inference 1 postings (0.1%)
Cybersecurity 1 postings (0.1%)
DFT 1 postings (0.1%)
Digital Signal Processing 1 postings (0.1%)

Other

Share of the latest scrape's postings that mention each skill.

Agile 125 postings (10.2%)
Responsible AI 124 postings (10.1%)
Event-Driven Architecture 49 postings (4.0%)
Salesforce 42 postings (3.4%)
n8n 38 postings (3.1%)
Jira 35 postings (2.9%)
Distributed Systems 33 postings (2.7%)
Code Review 31 postings (2.5%)
A/B Testing 25 postings (2.0%)
ServiceNow 24 postings (2.0%)

Month-over-month trends

Month-over-month shares for the top skills and role types. Every scrape is an independent cross-section of builtin.com listings, so each share is the fraction of that scrape's postings - not headcount and not hiring volume.

Skill trends by scrape

Share of that scrape's postings mentioning each skill. Every scrape is an independent cross-section, so shares are within-month.

GenAI

Skill Feb 4 Feb 27 Mar 27 Apr 22 May 29 Jun 25 Jul 22 Aug 25
LLMs 66.1% 58.6% 62.9% 62.3% 64.1% 64.8% 61.9% 58.6%
AI Agents 40.1% 38.6% 40.9% 44.5% 42.2% 46.1% 47.5% 35.8%
RAG 32.8% 40.4% 40.9% 37.4% 38.1% 41.9% 42.3% 43.2%
Prompt Engineering 26.1% 31.2% 36.2% 35.3% 33.6% 38.0% 36.9% 39.0%
Agentic Workflows 22.0% 24.1% 29.9% 30.1% 31.3% 31.2% 28.3% 42.0%
Generative AI 28.9% 36.2% 34.1% 33.2% 24.6% 30.6% 29.1% 24.7%
LangChain 16.9% 24.1% 24.7% 21.6% 20.1% 22.2% 22.7% 23.6%
LLM Evaluation 20.3% 17.4% 21.0% 20.2% 22.9% 25.8% 24.6% 21.4%

Languages

Skill Feb 4 Feb 27 Mar 27 Apr 22 May 29 Jun 25 Jul 22 Aug 25
Python 73.7% 75.4% 74.0% 68.8% 69.5% 68.0% 68.7% 69.1%
TypeScript 22.2% 16.7% 19.7% 17.5% 19.8% 20.8% 18.6% 18.8%
Java 15.4% 22.6% 17.8% 18.8% 16.3% 16.7% 17.4% 17.1%
SQL 11.1% 16.3% 12.8% 14.9% 15.7% 13.7% 13.8% 15.8%
JavaScript 9.6% 12.4% 12.1% 15.2% 11.5% 11.6% 10.2% 11.1%

Role mix by scrape

Share of each scrape's postings by role type: AI-first builds LLM products directly, AI-support builds around them, ML-first does classic ML, Unclassified has no extracted type.

Role type Feb 4 Feb 27 Mar 27 Apr 22 May 29 Jun 25 Jul 22 Aug 25
AI-first 71.5% 68.1% 71.3% 69.6% 69.2% 70.7% 69.3% 70.2%
AI-support 22.2% 25.3% 24.0% 24.7% 24.5% 25.2% 25.1% 23.2%
ML-first 5.9% 6.2% 4.4% 5.0% 4.5% 3.7% 4.3% 5.0%
Unclassified 0.3% 0.3% 0.3% 0.8% 1.8% 0.3% 1.4% 1.6%
Postings 895 869 680 645 919 888 846 1222

Top employers

Employers with the most postings in the latest scrape (Aug 25, 2026):

Company Postings Share
JPMorganChase 34 2.8%
Capital One 18 1.5%
Optum 18 1.5%
Microsoft 17 1.4%
Citi 14 1.1%
Cisco 13 1.1%
New York Life Insurance Company 12 1.0%
EXL 11 0.9%
PwC 11 0.9%
Wolters Kluwer 11 0.9%
NVIDIA 10 0.8%
STAFIDE 10 0.8%
Weekday, Inc. 10 0.8%
BJAK 8 0.7%
Binance 7 0.6%

Job locations by city

City-level posting locations in the latest scrape (Aug 25, 2026). A posting that lists several cities counts once per city, so the shares can add up to more than 100%.

Location Postings Share
Bengaluru 174 14.2%
New York 174 14.2%
London 101 8.3%
Hyderabad 73 6.0%
Pune 62 5.1%
Chennai 34 2.8%
San Francisco 34 2.8%
Mumbai 32 2.6%
Los Angeles 29 2.4%
Amsterdam 27 2.2%

Dataset and methodology

Scrape Postings
Feb 4 895
Feb 27 869
Mar 27 680
Apr 22 645
May 29 919
Jun 25 888
Jul 22 846
Aug 25 1,222
Total 6,964

The raw dataset lives in the guide repo's job-market directory. Each monthly directory holds one YAML file per posting with the extracted skills, role type, and locations.

Shares are within-scrape percentages of postings, rounded to one decimal place. We don't deduplicate across months, so a company hiring in several months appears in each month's cross-section. The converter regenerates this page from the scrapes, and the numbers update after every monthly scrape. Data through August 2026.

Read The AI Engineering Field Guide for the practical version of this data. For the structured path with interview prep, projects, and a community that builds, become a member.

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