The Tech AI Job Boom: Who’s Hiring, Paying Big $’s, and Where Talent Wants to Work

As AI continues to reshape industries and redefine work, companies are racing to hire top AI talent. But who’s actually winning the AI hiring war? We analyzed real-time job listings on Jobright, our AI-native job platform, which indexes thousands of roles across top employers, and surfaced some big movers and some notable ghosts in the machine.

🏆 The AI Hiring Heavyweights

Unsurprisingly, Big Tech leads the charge:

Amazon is far ahead of the pack with 2,898 AI-related open roles, more than triple its closest competitor. That’s a clear signal that Amazon isn’t just dabbling in AI — it’s infusing it into every corner of its operations: Alexa, AWS, logistics, search, and more.

Meta, Google, and Microsoft round out the top five, each posting between 500 and 850 roles. These companies are laying the groundwork for the next wave of AI-powered products — from productivity tools and copilots to next-gen LLM infrastructure.

😮 The Surprise Contenders

Beyond the expected tech giants, a new class of contenders is aggressively hiring for AI talent:

Turing (433+ roles): The remote engineering platform is staffing up fast — to build out AI matching algorithms and workforce intelligence tools.

xAI (268 roles): Elon Musk’s LLM challenger may have fewer employees than big tech companies, but on the heels of releasing its Grok 4 model last week, which it says is the top-scoring model on Humanity’s Last Exam, its hiring volume is also scaling rapidly.

Mindrift, Invisible Technologies, Labelbox: These relatively under-the-radar AI companies are punching above their weight, with 180–230 AI openings each. They may be riding the wave of generative AI services and task automation.

This wave of fast-growing startups signals a broader shift: the rise of verticalized AI — companies laser-focused on applying artificial intelligence to narrow, high-impact domains like recruiting, automation, and task-specific knowledge work.

Unlike generalist platforms building foundational LLMs, these firms are racing to own specific slices of the AI economy — from AI-driven developer placement (Turing) to invisible workforce orchestration (Invisible Technologies) to microtask optimization (Mindrift, Alignerr).

In a crowded AI market, specialization might be the fastest path to scale — and these startups are betting big on it.

🧩 Where Are the Usual Suspects?

Yet some of the most influential names in AI are eerily absent from the hiring charts — including OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA. What gives?

OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere — the very firms building foundational LLM models — are nowhere to be found.

NVIDIA, the hardware juggernaut of the AI boom, doesn’t appear either.

Tesla, which is often vocal about its AI-first vision for autonomy, is also absent.

IBM, Oracle, and Cisco — all with stated AI strategies — show limited job postings.

Notably missing as well is Apple. Despite recent announcements and upgrades to generative AI across iOS and macOS, Apple’s AI hiring footprint remains surprisingly quiet in public data..

This absence raises an intriguing question: Is Apple intentionally maintaining a lean, stealthy approach to AI recruitment, or is its AI investment lagging behind that of other Big Tech players? Either way, Apple’s minimal public hiring highlights a distinctly different strategy compared to companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta.

So what’s going on? Here are a few hypotheses:

1. Closed Recruiting Ecosystems

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic may be intentionally avoiding public job boards, relying instead on:

Direct outreach to top researchers
Academic and conference pipelines
Referrals and internal networks

This “stealth mode” recruiting protects confidentiality, targets high-signal candidates, and avoids the noise of inbound applications.

2. Hiring Less, Paying More

While some hire in volume, others hire selectively and pay exceptionally well. Here are 10 of the highest-paying roles currently available on Jobright. It’s not uncommon for these companies to offer $1 million compensation packages to retain a few dozen early to mid-career engineers and researchers, rather than hiring hundreds of generalists.

Job Title	Location	Company	Salary
Head of AI	Redwood City, CA	Chan Zuckerberg Initiative	Yearly: 1072000 – 1394000
Research Scientist – LLM Product Use	Remote (USA)	Netflix	Yearly: 400000 – 960000
Principal ML Engineer – Relevancy	New York, NY	Rokt	Yearly: 515000 – 750000
Engineering Manager – Creative AIGC	San Jose, CA	TikTok	Yearly: 435000 – 730000
Senior Director – Applied AI Research	Michigan, USA	Harnham	Yearly: 570000 – 570000
Research Engineer – ML	SF & NYC	Anthropic	Yearly: 340000 – 690000
ML Engineer – Inference	San Jose, CA	ByteDance	Yearly: 435000 – 585000
Distinguished ML Engineer – Discovery	San Mateo, CA	Roblox	Yearly: 448990 – 515210
Research Engineer – Data Processing	San Francisco, CA	OpenAI	Yearly: 380000 – 555000
VP of Technology – Virtual Expert Platform	Mountain View, CA	Intuit	Yearly: 384500 – 520500

As you can see even companies not hiring in bulk (like OpenAI and Anthropic) are behind some of the most lucrative AI job offers today.

3. Temporary Hiring Lulls

Some players, especially those in deep R&D phases, may be between funding rounds or holding off until new product launches. That doesn’t mean they’re shrinking — just that they’re not actively scaling up hiring at this moment.

4. Private Recruiting Channels

Highly funded AI companies may use recruiting firms or internal sourcers that bypass public platforms altogether. Their roles might exist — they just don’t surface in traditional job aggregators.

In contrast, companies on the Jobright platform are more likely to rely on transparent, scalable recruiting funnels — which tells us where open AI opportunity is most accessible today.

🔥 The Tech Companies AI Talent Wants to Work at (According to Jobright Applicants)

According to Jobright’s application data, these are the top companies AI job seekers are most eager to join:

Top AI Companies by Jobright Application Interest 🔍

🏆 Scale AI: 103 Average applicants per open role
🥈 Adobe: 87
🥉 XAI: 84
4️⃣ Meta 67
5️⃣ ByteDance 57
6️⃣ Amazon: 47
7️⃣ Google: 47
8️⃣ Microsoft: 42
9️⃣ Turing: 28
🔟 DoorDash: 17

Prestige and hiring brand recognition still help for a company like Adobe, but companies like Scale AI and xAI are generating outsize interest from candidates, showing that buzz, velocity, and founder brand can rival scale.

The data insight comes at an interesting time for Scale AI, which has just eliminated 200 full-time employees (14%) of its staff, only a few weeks after Meta invested more than $14 billion in the company and its founder, Alexandr Wang, joined Meta’s superintelligence team. Clearly, the company is one that AI talent has been very hungry to work at, but that could change given the layoffs impacting its hiring brand and Meta now owning a 49% stake in the company.

💼 Looking to Land One of These Roles?

Jobright’s AI-native job platform doesn’t just surface where AI talent is going — it helps you get there. With Jobright Agent, you can skip the endless scroll and let an intelligent assistant find, rank, and even apply to jobs on your behalf.

Upload your resume, tell it what you want, and let the Agent do the work — from surfacing tailored openings to submitting optimized applications in seconds. It’s like having a headhunter in your pocket.

Because in the AI job boom, speed, fit, and visibility matter more than ever.