State of Agentic Hiring
As of October 2026, AgenticCareers.co tracks 3,007 open agentic roles across 995 companies. 40% disclose pay, at a median of $230,400. 2,119 roles opened in the last 30 days. The largest category is AI Agent Engineer (15.7%).
- 3,007
- Open agentic roles
- 995
- Companies hiring
- $230,400
- Median salary
- 2,119
- Added in 30 days
Salary intelligence
Median $230,400 (p25 $177,500, p75 $286,000), USD annual, across 1200 disclosed listings.
| Role | Median (USD) | Spread (p25 to p75) | Listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Safety | $288,000 | $225,000 to $355,500 | 34 |
| AI Infrastructure | $270,000 | $230,400 to $360,000 | 140 |
| AI Platform / SRE | $261,500 | $230,000 to $312,500 | 71 |
| AI Security | $255,000 | $200,000 to $312,500 | 87 |
| Full Stack AI | $246,150 | $211,200 to $325,500 | 51 |
| AI Researcher | $245,000 | $190,278 to $392,500 | 51 |
| AI Agent Engineer | $240,000 | $185,000 to $285,500 | 155 |
| Forward Deployed Engineer | $230,000 | $188,440 to $250,000 | 82 |
| AI Sales / GTM | $225,000 | $195,000 to $270,000 | 47 |
| AI Solutions Engineer | $220,000 | $176,000 to $249,500 | 102 |
| Data Scientist | $213,410 | $173,200 to $275,000 | 64 |
| LLM Engineer | $195,000 | $140,000 to $245,000 | 43 |
| ML Engineer | $182,925 | $160,000 to $229,500 | 116 |
| General AI | $180,000 | $146,000 to $211,000 | 47 |
A median is published only where at least 30 listings disclose pay. Across our 2026 monthly snapshots, segments above that line moved under 5% month over month, while segments in the teens moved by as much as 29%, so a smaller sample would be noise reported as a finding. Held back this month, with their disclosed-pay counts: AI Product Manager (24), AI Ops / DevOps (18), RAG / Search (16), Robotics (13), Prompt Engineer (10), Computer Vision (9), NLP Engineer (8), Conversational AI (7), Generative AI (5); and by seniority Junior (23), Intern (11), Executive (2).
Hiring velocity
2,119 new roles in the last 30 days (70.5% of the board). The categories adding roles fastest:
- AI Agent Engineer+323
- AI Solutions Engineer+265
- AI Infrastructure+197
- ML Engineer+148
- Forward Deployed Engineer+137
Role & skill landscape
Where agentic hiring concentrates across role categories.
| Category | Roles | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Agent Engineer | 472 | 15.7% | |
| AI Solutions Engineer | 362 | 12% | |
| AI Infrastructure | 277 | 9.2% | |
| ML Engineer | 222 | 7.4% | |
| Forward Deployed Engineer | 177 | 5.9% | |
| AI Researcher | 158 | 5.3% | |
| Data Scientist | 156 | 5.2% | |
| LLM Engineer | 141 | 4.7% | |
| AI Security | 137 | 4.6% | |
| AI Platform / SRE | 132 | 4.4% | |
| Full Stack AI | 101 | 3.4% | |
| General AI | 99 | 3.3% | |
| Computer Vision | 95 | 3.2% | |
| AI Safety | 90 | 3% | |
| AI Sales / GTM | 86 | 2.9% | |
| AI Product Manager | 66 | 2.2% | |
| RAG / Search | 58 | 1.9% | |
| Prompt Engineer | 53 | 1.8% | |
| AI Ops / DevOps | 51 | 1.7% | |
| NLP Engineer | 27 | 0.9% | |
| Robotics | 19 | 0.6% | |
| Conversational AI | 16 | 0.5% | |
| Generative AI | 12 | 0.4% |
Company leaderboard
995 companies hiring; the top 10 hold 35.2% of open roles.
- 01OpenAI267
- 02Anthropic166
- 03Databricks146
- 04NVIDIA122
- 05Capital One73
- 06Salesforce71
- 07Sierra56
- 08Scale AI51
- 09Harvey49
- 10Adobe45
- 11Cloudflare40
- 12LangChain40
- 13Together AI40
- 14Cohere39
- 15Perplexity AI36
The market has almost no entry level
115 of 3007 live roles are junior or internship level.
| Level | Roles | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Mid | 1,422 | 47% |
| Senior | 743 | 25% |
| Staff | 465 | 15% |
| Lead | 248 | 8% |
| Junior | 60 | 2% |
| Intern | 55 | 2% |
| Executive | 14 | 0% |
A normal engineering market has a base: more junior roles than staff roles, because companies expect to grow people. This one has 465 staff-level listings against 115 junior and internship listings (60 junior, 55 internship), and 14 executive listings, fewer than the entry-level count. Mid is the most common level, with 47% of roles.
The likeliest explanation is capacity rather than hostility. Agent teams are mostly small, mostly new, and mostly assembled by moving experienced engineers across from other teams, which leaves nobody whose job is to grow a junior. That is a temporary condition, and the leading indicator to watch is internships: when that number moves, junior hiring follows about a year later.
Where the entry-level roles do exist is counterintuitive. They cluster with the smallest employers rather than the largest, which we cover in the entry-level analysis.
Who publishes pay, and who offers remote
40% of listings disclose a salary range, and employers with one open role disclose least.
| Employer segment | Listings | Disclose pay | Remote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ten largest employers | 1,046 | 44% | 6% |
| Everyone else | 1,961 | 39% | 33% |
| Employers with one open role | 789 | 30% | 43% |
The ten largest employers disclose pay in 44% of their listings, higher than the 39% for everyone else. Employers with a single open role disclose in 30%, below the rest of the market.
Employers with one open role advertise remote work in 43% of their listings, against 24% market-wide and 6% among the ten largest employers. The most accessible part of this market on location is also the least forthcoming about money.
| Level | Roles | Remote |
|---|---|---|
| Mid | 1,422 | 23% |
| Senior | 743 | 27% |
| Staff | 465 | 19% |
| Lead | 248 | 26% |
| Junior | 60 | 27% |
| Intern | 55 | 13% |
Remote share does not move in one direction with seniority: Intern is lowest at 13% and Junior highest at 27%, among levels with enough listings to report. The full breakdown by role category is in the remote gradient analysis.
Methodology
3,007 live roles from 15 sources. Salary: USD annual midpoint of disclosed range. A segment median is published only at n>=30 disclosed listings, the point at which month-over-month swing across our 2026 snapshots falls under 5%; smaller segments are named under salary.withheld with their sample size rather than estimated.. Every listing is classified by role. Only AI and ML roles are counted, and a role posted in several locations is counted once. 1059 listings for non-AI roles at AI companies (backend, frontend, sales and similar) and 492 additional locations of multi-city postings are published on the site but excluded from every figure here.
Cite this dataset
Licensed CC BY 4.0. Cite as:
AgenticCareers.co, State of Agentic Hiring, October 2026. https://agenticcareers.co/state-of-agentic-hiring