AI hiring, counted
We counted 20,971 tech job posts. Here is what the AI hiring numbers show.
Deemwar data note, 12 November 2026. Every figure is our own count from free public sources; the rules we wrote before counting, the method notes and the results are published with it.
We went in with a view: AI and forward-deployed roles are booming, and small companies are the ones missing out. Before counting, we wrote down four questions and what result would prove us wrong. Then we counted. Parts of our view held. One part did not.
What we counted
1. The base rate: about 1 post in 11 has an AI term in its title
Of 20,971 postings, 1,879 (9.0%) are AI-titled and 749 (3.6%) are AI or ML engineer titles. 383 (1.8%) are forward-deployed. Software-titled roles are 6,542 postings (31.2%); within those, 17.5% are AI-titled and 4.6% forward-deployed.
One label we expected to see barely exists: titles that combine AI and automation number 7 out of 20,971.
2. Over 13 months on Hacker News: forward-deployed up, AI-engineer roles flat
Posts naming forward-deployed rose from 5 of 391 (1.3%) in November 2025 to 10 of 228 (4.4%) in November 2026. Forward-deployed peaked at 5.2% (16 of 307) in June 2026 and has eased since. Posts mentioning an AI or ML engineer role went from 19.4% to 18.4%, which is flat by our pre-set two-endpoint rule; month to month the share ranged from 14.0% to 22.4%. Posts mentioning any AI term went from 58.8% to 63.6%.
The number of posts per month fell from 391 to 228. The shares above are of a shrinking pool.
For comparison, Indeed Hiring Lab reports US software postings up almost 15% since February 2025 while all postings fell 7%, with 71% of the net software growth between May 2025 and May 2026 in senior roles (Indeed Hiring Lab). Lightcast counts forward-deployed postings up more than 1,000% from January to August 2026 against the same months of 2025 (Fortune). Our Hacker News series points the same way on forward-deployed, from a much smaller base.
3. Forward-deployed roles sit at a handful of companies
Of the 383 forward-deployed postings, 250 (65.3%) are at five companies: Databricks (113), Palantir (73), OpenAI (39), Scale AI (13) and Cohere (12). 43 of the 185 companies have any; 142 have none.
4. Small companies: no sign of a gap in our sample
We measured company size by how many posts a board has open, which is a hiring footprint, not headcount. AI-titled share of postings:
| Board size | Postings | Companies | AI-titled | 95% range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small (under 20 open) | 361 | 48 | 11.6% | 8.7% to 15.4% |
| Mid (20 to 99) | 3,908 | 74 | 7.6% | 6.8% to 8.5% |
| Large (100+) | 16,702 | 63 | 9.2% | 8.8% to 9.7% |
Small boards are not below large ones; the ranges overlap, so we cannot say they are above. On Hacker News, 38 of 55 posts that state a small or early stage (69.1%) mention AI, against 8 of 14 (57.1%) that state a large or late stage. Fourteen is too few to lean on.
5. By region
AI-titled share of postings: United States 10.3% (1,112 of 10,751), Europe including the UK 9.1% (343 of 3,782), Australia and New Zealand 6.5% (23 of 353). The Australian sample is small (95% range 4.4% to 9.6%); the US range is 9.8% to 10.9%. The US-Europe gap is small; only Australia is clearly lower. Forward-deployed postings: 185 in the US (1.7%), 78 in Europe (2.1%), 9 in Australia and New Zealand (2.5%).
What we pre-registered, and what happened
| Question | Result that would prove us wrong | What we found | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is it big? | Forward-deployed under 1% or AI-titled under 5% of postings | 1.8% and 9.0% | Not disproved |
| Is it growing? | Share flat or falling on Hacker News (under 2 points of change) | Forward-deployed +3.1 points; AI/ML-engineer roles -1.0; any AI term +4.8 | Mixed |
| Do small companies hire fewer AI roles? | Small boards within 3 points of, or above, large | 11.6% vs 9.2% | Disproved in this sample |
| Is the US ahead? | EU or Australia at or above the US | 10.3% vs 9.1% vs 6.5% | Not disproved (US-Europe gap is small) |
What surprised us, and what contradicts our view
- Small is not behind. We expected small companies to post fewer AI roles. We cannot find a gap: 11.6% on small boards against 9.2% on large, with overlapping ranges. This is the main result that went against us.
- Forward-deployed is rising, but narrow. The Hacker News share is 3.4 times its November 2025 level, though it peaked in June 2026 and has eased since. On company boards, 65.3% of the roles are at five companies and 142 of 185 companies have none.
- AI-engineer roles did not grow as a share on Hacker News. Mentions of an AI or ML engineer role were 19.4% a year ago and 18.4% now.
- The headline share is driven partly by AI-native companies. This check was not pre-registered, so treat it as exploratory. The 15 AI-native companies we happened to include (a hand-picked list, in the data folder) have 17.0% AI-titled postings (531 of 3,123); the other 170 boards have 7.6% (1,348 of 17,848).
- Hacker News hiring volume fell from 391 to 228 posts a month, so growth in a share is not growth in jobs.
What these numbers cannot tell you
They are one sample of 185 companies we picked, one snapshot for company boards, and a self-selected Hacker News crowd. Title rules miss roles that do AI work under other names (a spot check found about 7 in 10 unflagged software titles with an AI-like word were real AI work, such as model and inference engineer). The forward-deployed count includes some manager and program-manager titles on forward-deployed teams (7 of 38 in a spot check), and AI-titled includes non-engineering roles such as policy and marketing. Board size is not headcount. None of this measures what small businesses need, only what the companies in our sample advertise.
Method and data
The pre-registration (questions, definitions, and what would prove us wrong), the method notes and the computed results are published with this page. We will repeat the count each month with the same script and publish the change.
Pre-registration (PREREG.md) · How we count (README.md) · Results (results.json)
Sources: company job boards on Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby, collected 12 November 2026; Ask HN “Who is hiring?” threads, November 2025 to November 2026; Indeed Hiring Lab; Fortune.