
Job Titles Explain Under 10% of the Skills a Tech Job Requires
For 52.5% of job postings, most of their closest skill matches carry a different job title. Product Engineer postings look like another job 81% of the time; Product Designer, 9%.
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For 52.5% of job postings, most of their closest skill matches carry a different job title. Product Engineer postings look like another job 81% of the time; Product Designer, 9%.

We scored 222 AI/ML/DS skills on five independent difficulty signals. Out of 222, exactly one scores positive on all five: JAX — Google's numerical-computing library that powers Gemini, Gemma, and parts of Claude.

AI Engineer postings mention fine-tuning more than any other role (26.2% vs 18.2% MLE vs 4.9% DS) — but a deep dive into 6,802 jobs shows the technical fine-tuning toolkit (LoRA, RLHF, distillation, post-training) actually lives in ML Engineer postings.

We analyzed 3,277 job postings for Data Scientists, ML Engineers, and AI Engineers across four seniority levels. The biggest compensation jump isn't between mid and senior — it's Senior to Staff, where ML Engineers earn a median $59K more. And most 'hot' AI skills (Generative AI, prompt engineering) disappear as premium drivers once you control for level. Here's the data.

We analyzed 77,735 job postings and found that the Bay Area tech market is statistically distinct from everywhere else. Rest-of-US and non-US skill profiles are indistinguishable for Data Scientists and AI Engineers. Here's what the chi-square tests reveal.

What 3,215 Job Postings Reveal About Skills That Define each role Ask five people the difference between a Data Scientist, ML Engineer, and AI Engineer, and you'll get five different answers. I decided to let the data…

Creating a portfolio of your data science projects is generally a great idea. But as an NLP hiring manager, there is one common portfolio project that I’ve always kind of shrugged at: sentiment analysis. So when I…