AI engineering talent statistics (2026)
59 figures on AI engineering demand, pay, hiring speed and developer AI use from BLS, Levels.fyi, Stack Overflow, GitHub, LinkedIn and Indeed, each linked to its source.
By the Ryz Labs team · Updated October 2026
In 2026, demand for AI engineering talent is growing while the wider software job market is still below its pre-pandemic level: AI engineer is the fastest-growing job title in the US on LinkedIn's 2026 Jobs on the Rise list, and 37% of the past year's increase in US software development postings came from jobs with AI in the title (Indeed Hiring Lab). Pay reflects it: US ML and AI software engineers report median total compensation of $250,000 on Levels.fyi, against $199,000 for all US software engineers.
We compiled 59 statistics on AI engineering talent from primary public sources and checked every number against its source on October 30, 2026. Each figure below has the year it describes and a link. Levels.fyi data is self-reported and updates daily, so we give the date we read it.
Key takeaways
- Demand is concentrated at the senior, AI-skilled end. 71% of the rise in US software postings from May 2025 to May 2026 came from senior roles (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2026).
- AI engineers earn a clear premium. The US median for ML and AI software engineers is $250,000 in total compensation, $51,000 above the median for all US software engineers (Levels.fyi, October 2026).
- Hiring is slow and interview-heavy. Technical roles take a median 76 days from job opening to first hire and 17.6 interviews per hire (Ashby, data through Q1 2026).
- AI coding tools are now daily work. 73% of developers who use AI coding assistants or agents use them every day (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026).
- Early-career developers are losing ground. US software developers ages 22 to 25 saw employment fall nearly 20% from 2024 (AI Index 2026).
Demand and job postings
- #1: AI engineer is the fastest-growing job title in the US on LinkedIn's 2026 Jobs on the Rise list, based on jobs started from January 2023 to July 2025. (LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise, 2026)
- LangChain, RAG and PyTorch are the most common skills among AI engineers on LinkedIn. (LinkedIn, 2026)
- 3.7 years is the median prior experience of people starting AI engineer roles, and most come from software engineer, data scientist and full stack engineer jobs. (LinkedIn, 2026)
- San Francisco, New York City and Dallas have the most AI engineer jobs in the US. (LinkedIn, 2026)
- Almost 15%: US software development job postings on Indeed grew that much from late February 2025 to mid-2026, while overall postings fell 7%. (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2026)
- 27.5% is how far US software development postings remain below their pre-pandemic level, even after that rebound. (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2026)
- 71% of the increase in US software development postings between May 2025 and May 2026 came from senior roles, and 37% from jobs with AI in the title. (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2026)
- 2.6% of all US job postings required AI skills in 2025, per Lightcast data; Singapore led at 4.69%. (Stanford HAI, AI Index 2026)
- 13.2% of job postings in the US information sector asked for AI skills in 2025, up from 7.8% in 2024. (Stanford HAI, AI Index 2026)
- 111% growth in mentions of generative AI skills in US AI job postings from 2024 to 2025, while postings citing agentic AI and orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph also rose. (Stanford HAI, AI Index 2026)
- 258,674 US AI job postings mentioned Python in 2025, the most of any specialized skill. (Stanford HAI, AI Index 2026)
- 0.9% of US LinkedIn members are AI engineering talent; the share is highest in San Francisco (3.0%), Seattle (2.4%) and Austin (2.3%). (LinkedIn Economic Graph, April 2026)
- 24% is how far overall US hiring on LinkedIn sat below February 2020 levels in March 2026. (LinkedIn Economic Graph, April 2026)
- 54% of CEOs say they are hiring for AI roles that did not exist a year earlier. (IBM CEO Study, 2025)
- 2.1% of LinkedIn members in Israel are AI talent, the highest concentration among the countries the AI Index tracked in 2025. (Stanford HAI, AI Index 2026)
AI engineer salaries
- $250,000 is the median total compensation for ML and AI software engineers in the US (5,942 salaries, read October 30, 2026). (Levels.fyi, 2026)
- $170,000 to $371,500 is the 25th to 75th percentile range for US ML and AI software engineers, and the 90th percentile is $515,000. (Levels.fyi, 2026)
- $199,000 is the median total compensation for all US software engineers (47,701 salaries, read October 30, 2026). (Levels.fyi, 2026)
- $392,000 is the 90th percentile total compensation for all US software engineers. (Levels.fyi, 2026)
- $135,980 was the median annual wage for US software developers in May 2025. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
- $140,300 was the median annual wage for computer and information research scientists in May 2025. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
- $120,230 was the median annual wage for data scientists in May 2025. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
- $104,300 was the median annual wage for software quality assurance analysts and testers in May 2025. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
Why BLS and Levels.fyi differ: BLS reports base wages for every worker in an occupation, while Levels.fyi reports self-submitted total compensation (base, bonus and equity), weighted toward large tech employers. Use BLS for the broad market and Levels.fyi for competitive offers.
Employment outlook
- 10% projected growth in employment of software developers, QA analysts and testers from 2025 to 2035, much faster than average. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
- 106,100 openings a year are projected for software developers, QA analysts and testers, on average, over the decade. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
- About 1.7 million jobs were held by US software developers in 2025. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
- 35% projected growth in data scientist employment from 2025 to 2035. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
- 24,800 data scientist openings a year are projected, on average, over the decade. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
- 22% projected growth in employment of computer and information research scientists from 2025 to 2035. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026)
- Nearly 20%: the drop in employment of US software developers ages 22 to 25 from 2024, even as headcount for older developers kept growing. (Stanford HAI, AI Index 2026, Economy)
The AI skills gap
- 29% of employees will need reskilling for a different role and 53% upskilling for their current one between 2026 and 2028, CEOs expect. (IBM CEO Study, 2026)
- 31% of the workforce will need retraining or reskilling over three years, and 65% of CEOs plan to use automation to address skill gaps. (IBM CEO Study, 2025)
- 59% of organizations say knowledge gaps are the main obstacle to implementing responsible AI. (Stanford HAI, AI Index 2026, Responsible AI)
- 17% growth in AI-specific governance roles in 2025. (Stanford HAI, AI Index 2026, Responsible AI)
- 79% of developers want to build their AI skills, while 52% are still learning new coding skills. (Stack Overflow, 2026)
Time to hire technical talent
- 76 days is the median time from opening a technical job to the first hire, against 56 days for business roles. (Ashby, data through Q1 2026)
- 40 days is the median time to hire for technical roles, measured from application to accepted offer. (Ashby, 2026)
- 17.6 interviews per technical hire on average, a 52% increase from about 11 in 2021. (Ashby, 2026)
- 23.3 hours of total interview time per technical hire in Q1 2026, against 12.2 hours for a business hire. (Ashby, 2026)
- 7.3% offer conversion rate for technical roles, against 10.4% for business roles. (Ashby, 2026)
Developer AI tool usage
- 73% of developers who use AI coding assistants or agents use them daily. (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026)
- 31% of daily AI users use it for more than four hours a day. (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026)
- 66% of coding-agent users use Claude Code and 59% use GitHub Copilot, the two leaders. (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026)
- 69% use AI to generate code in a familiar area, the top task, ahead of debugging and refactoring (64%) and writing tests (58%). (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026)
- 20% use AI for deploying, operating or troubleshooting production systems. (Stack Overflow, 2026)
- 62% of developers view AI at least somewhat positively, rising to 71% of daily users. (Stack Overflow, 2026)
- 48% trust AI when they can easily validate the answer; only 16% trust it for most tasks that are not important work decisions. (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026)
- 50% of developers use AI coding tools daily, and 65% in top-quartile organizations, per a survey of US enterprise AI buyers. (Menlo Ventures, 2025)
- Over 36 million developers joined GitHub in the past year, more than one per second. (GitHub Octoverse 2025)
- Nearly 80% of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. (GitHub Octoverse 2025)
- 1.1 million public repositories use an LLM SDK, and 693,867 of them were created in the past 12 months, up 178% year over year. (GitHub Octoverse 2025)
- 2.6 million contributors work in Python, up 48%, and it remains dominant for AI and data science. (GitHub Octoverse 2025)
- August 2025 is when TypeScript overtook Python and JavaScript to become the most used language on GitHub. (GitHub Octoverse 2025)
- 72.6% of developers who use Copilot code review said it improved their effectiveness, in GitHub interviews. (GitHub Octoverse 2025)
Remote work
What this means for engineering leaders
The data describes a market where the people you need are senior, AI-fluent and slow to hire. Postings growth is concentrated in senior and AI-titled roles, the median AI engineer costs far more than the median software engineer, and a technical hire takes about 11 weeks from opening the role to the first hire. Meanwhile, almost every developer already uses AI coding tools, but only one in five uses them on production systems.
- Hire for production experience, not tool familiarity. Using a coding agent is now table stakes. The scarce skill is shipping and operating LLM systems with evaluation, monitoring and cost control.
- Budget with real numbers. Use BLS for base pay benchmarks and Levels.fyi for competitive total compensation, then compare against AI engineer rates and machine learning engineer rates for outside teams.
- Count the hiring time. Seventy-six days of open headcount is most of a quarter of roadmap. Price that into build-vs-hire decisions.
This is the gap Ryz fills. We provide top 1% senior engineers who work on your team, reporting to your leads, on US business hours, and AI pod teams that build AI systems in your cloud and repos and ship them to production. You meet named engineers before the engagement starts, and teams can start in under two weeks once you say go. Typical cost is $7,000 to $15,000 per engineer per month; see what an AI pod costs or hire AI engineers directly.
Methodology
We used only primary or first-party sources we could open and read on October 30, 2026: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (May 2025 wages, 2025 to 2035 projections), Levels.fyi, the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026 (more than 30,000 respondents), GitHub Octoverse 2025, LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise 2026 and LinkedIn Economic Graph, Indeed Hiring Lab, the Stanford HAI AI Index 2026 (which uses Lightcast and LinkedIn data), IBM's 2025 and 2026 CEO studies, Menlo Ventures and Ashby. Survey bases differ, so compare figures within a source rather than across sources. Statistics found only on secondary blogs were excluded.
How to cite this page
Ryz Labs, "AI engineering talent statistics (2026)," updated October 30, 2026, ryzlabs.com/guides/ai-engineering-talent-statistics. Please also name the original source of any figure you quote, for example "BLS data compiled by Ryz Labs."
Related
FAQ
How much do AI engineers make in 2026?
US ML and AI software engineers report median total compensation of $250,000 on Levels.fyi (5,942 salaries, October 30, 2026), with a 90th percentile of $515,000. BLS does not publish a separate AI engineer occupation; computer and information research scientists had a median annual wage of $140,300 in May 2025.
Is demand for AI engineers growing?
Yes. AI engineer tops LinkedIn's 2026 Jobs on the Rise list for the US, and Indeed Hiring Lab found 37% of the increase in US software development postings between May 2025 and May 2026 came from jobs with AI in the title. AI skills appeared in 2.6% of all US job postings in 2025, per Lightcast data in the AI Index.
How long does it take to hire a technical role?
Ashby's data through Q1 2026 puts the median at 76 days from opening a technical job to the first hire, and 40 days from application to accepted offer. Technical hires average 17.6 interviews and 23.3 hours of interview time.
What share of developers use AI coding tools?
In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026, 73% of developers who use AI coding assistants or agents use them daily, and Claude Code (66%) and GitHub Copilot (59%) lead among coding agents. GitHub reports that nearly 80% of new developers on the platform use Copilot within their first week.
How many software developers work remotely?
34.8% of respondents to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026 work fully remote and 17.6% fully in person, with the rest hybrid or flexible. In the USA, 48% of developers work remotely.
Questions we didn't answer? Email info@ryzlabs.com.