AI Jobs & Careers Guide 2026

AI Jobs & Careers Guide 2026

Your guide to careers in artificial intelligence.

Hot AI Roles in 2026

Role Salary Range Demand
ML Engineer $150-300K 🔥 Very High
AI Researcher $200-500K 🔥 Very High
AI Product Manager $150-250K High
Data Scientist $120-200K High
Prompt Engineer $100-180K Medium
AI Ethics Researcher $120-200K Growing
MLOps Engineer $140-220K High
AI Solutions Architect $160-280K High

Top AI Companies Hiring

Big Tech

Company AI Roles Remote?
OpenAI Research, Engineering Hybrid
Anthropic ML, Research Hybrid
Google DeepMind Research, Engineering Hybrid
Meta AI Research, Engineering Hybrid
Microsoft AI, Azure Hybrid

Startups

Company Hot Roles Website
Scale AI ML, Operations scale.com/careers
Databricks Engineering databricks.com/careers
Anysphere (Cursor) Engineering cursor.sh/careers
Adept Research, Engineering adept.ai/careers
Hugging Face Open Source huggingface.co

Interview Prep

Common Questions

  1. System Design - Design an LLM system
  2. ML Fundamentals - Neural networks, transformers
  3. Practical - Fine-tuning, prompts, RAG

Resources

How to Break Into AI

Skills Needed

  1. Python - Essential
  2. ML/Deep Learning - PyTorch or TensorFlow
  3. Math - Linear algebra, probability, stats
  4. SQL - Data manipulation
  5. Cloud - AWS/GCP/Azure

Learning Paths

For Engineers

  1. Fast.ai course → Papers
  2. Kaggle competitions
  3. Build AI projects
  4. Contribute to open source

For PMs

  1. AI fundamentals course
  2. Understand use cases
  3. Build AI product experience
  4. Network in AI communities

Remote AI Jobs

Platform Description
Remotive remotive.com
We Work Remotely weworkremotely.com
Remote OK remoteok.com
AI Jobs ai-jobs.net

Salary Negotiation

  • Know the market - Levels.fai
  • Equity matters - Stock options can be significant
  • Remote premium - Often 10-20% higher
  • Switching bonus - Common $20-50K

Resources

Last updated: February 2026