Posts tagged AI Engineer.
A new line has spread through AI job ads: "this is not a research role." Across 62,659 postings it turns out to be rare, it carries no pay premium, and the ads that use it often ask for the evaluation work they claim not to want.
We traced 568,663 career histories back to the 1990s. Software Engineering fell from 69% of tech hiring to 41% - and the six roles that replaced it differ by 54x in how many of their people hold a PhD.
Research Scientist ($215K) and ML Engineer ($209K) top the senior rung. But the gap to a plain software engineer is $16K, while the gap between a mid and a staff engineer doing the same job is $65K.
We mapped advertised software-engineer pay against how much each company is actually growing or shrinking — using live job postings and workforce-flow data. Pay turns out to tell you almost nothing about where a company is headed.
We mapped the AI Engineer role from both sides — Skillenai's talent graph and job postings. Who feeds it, where they go next, and why the skills employers ask for don't match what workers list.
US employers ask 2.5x more generalist software engineers than AI engineers to build with LLMs, and the generalists do it in TypeScript and Ruby, without LangGraph. A demand-side look at who really builds AI.
Under identical titles, federal and private tech postings ask for different tools — a federal Data Scientist does statistics and reporting where a private one ships Python and experiments — and several modern data roles barely exist as federal jobs.
I tested my analogy that Forward Deployed Engineers are to AI Engineers what Solutions Architects were to Software Engineers. Across ~44K postings, the data agrees: FDE is literally AIE on the AI axis, SA on the customer axis. Plus, two twists I didn't expect.
Fortune today: spring 2026 hiring is broad-based. Jensen Huang: "software engineers are increasing." Both right at the aggregate. Drop a level and our US tech corpus shows tech has roughly two career-entry roles — Software Engineer and Data Analyst — and a longer list of post-experience lateral specializations (MLE, Platform, SRE, Backend).
A new LSE working paper used 243M hire records to argue remote work — not AI — caused the entry-level hiring collapse. We tested the prediction in today's US tech job postings, role by role. Every Bonferroni-significant broken ladder is in an AI-light role.
