Home / AI Engineer Skills 2026
What 188 top AI companies actually want in AI engineers
We analyzed 2,855 open AI-engineering roles at companies from OpenAI and Anthropic to Waymo, Anduril, and Stripe — and ranked every skill, tool, and responsibility by how many companies ask for it. Not opinions. Job descriptions.
2,855job postings analyzed
188companies, labs to robotics
92skills, tools & duties ranked
Skills & concepts
What you need to know: concepts, platforms, and engineering fundamentals.
1Python 155 cos
Appears in postings at 155 of 188 companies (1605 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
2LLMs 155 cos
Appears in postings at 155 of 188 companies (1061 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
Prep for it: interview questions.3APIs / backend services 152 cos
Appears in postings at 152 of 188 companies (937 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
4Agents 150 cos
Appears in postings at 150 of 188 companies (1007 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
Prep for it: interview questions.5Observability / monitoring 144 cos
Appears in postings at 144 of 188 companies (801 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
6Customer-facing / forward-deployed 126 cos
Appears in postings at 126 of 188 companies (1111 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuspalantirwritersnowflakedecagon
Prep for it: interview questions.7Evals / benchmarking 125 cos
Appears in postings at 125 of 188 companies (529 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirsnowflake
Prep for it: interview questions.8Distributed systems 115 cos
Appears in postings at 115 of 188 companies (535 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
9Security 113 cos
Appears in postings at 113 of 188 companies (803 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwritersnowflake
10AWS 112 cos
Appears in postings at 112 of 188 companies (641 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaianthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwritersnowflakedecagon
Prep for it: interview questions.11TypeScript / React frontend 110 cos
Appears in postings at 110 of 188 companies (517 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwritersnowflake
12Kubernetes 110 cos
Appears in postings at 110 of 188 companies (465 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwritersnowflake
Prep for it: interview questions.13Data pipelines / ETL 109 cos
Appears in postings at 109 of 188 companies (639 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
Prep for it: interview questions.14Inference optimization 103 cos
Appears in postings at 103 of 188 companies (391 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
15SQL / databases 98 cos
Appears in postings at 98 of 188 companies (485 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
16PyTorch 97 cos
Appears in postings at 97 of 188 companies (420 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
Prep for it: interview questions.17CI/CD 97 cos
Appears in postings at 97 of 188 companies (405 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwriter
Prep for it: interview questions.18MLOps / ML platform 92 cos
Appears in postings at 92 of 188 companies (377 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxwritersnowflake
Prep for it: interview questions.19GCP 90 cos
Appears in postings at 90 of 188 companies (511 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaianthropicapplied-intuitionscaleainebiuswritersnowflakedecagoncognitiondatadogdeepgram
Prep for it: interview questions.20Fine-tuning 90 cos
Appears in postings at 90 of 188 companies (316 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirsnowflake
Prep for it: interview questions.21Safety / alignment 85 cos
Appears in postings at 85 of 188 companies (377 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxwritersnowflake
22Docker / containers 84 cos
Appears in postings at 84 of 188 companies (290 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicapplied-intuitionshield-aiscaleainebiuspalantirwritersnowflake
23Vector DBs / embeddings 78 cos
Appears in postings at 78 of 188 companies (278 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaianthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxpalantirwritersnowflakecognitiondeepgram
24Computer vision 75 cos
Appears in postings at 75 of 188 companies (317 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoapplied-intuitionanthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxdatadogdeepgram
25Azure 71 cos
Appears in postings at 71 of 188 companies (461 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiapplied-intuitionanthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuswritersnowflakecognitiondatadogdeepgram
Prep for it: interview questions.26RLHF / RL 70 cos
Appears in postings at 70 of 188 companies (245 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoapplied-intuitionanthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxsnowflakecognition
Prep for it: interview questions.27RAG 70 cos
Appears in postings at 70 of 188 companies (223 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoanthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxsnowflakedatadogdeepgram
Prep for it: interview questions.28Prompt engineering 67 cos
Appears in postings at 67 of 188 companies (185 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiwaymoanthropicscaleainebiuszooxwritersnowflakedecagondatadogdeepgram
Prep for it: interview questions.29Terraform / IaC 66 cos
Appears in postings at 66 of 188 companies (211 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiapplied-intuitionanthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxwriterdecagoncognitiondatadog
Prep for it: interview questions.30TensorFlow 64 cos
Appears in postings at 64 of 188 companies (222 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoapplied-intuitionanthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxwritersnowflake
31Distributed training 62 cos
Appears in postings at 62 of 188 companies (182 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoapplied-intuitionanthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxwritersnowflake
Prep for it: interview questions.32Go / Rust systems 60 cos
Appears in postings at 60 of 188 companies (238 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoapplied-intuitionanthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuspalantirsnowflakecognition
33CUDA / GPU kernels 52 cos
Appears in postings at 52 of 188 companies (156 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilwaymoapplied-intuitionanthropicscaleainebiuszooxsnowflakedatadogdeepgram
34NLP 52 cos
Appears in postings at 52 of 188 companies (115 postings). Most postings at:
databrickswaymoapplied-intuitionanthropicscaleainebiuszooxwritersnowflakedatadogdeepgramcohere
35Data labeling / annotation 50 cos
Appears in postings at 50 of 188 companies (120 postings). Most postings at:
openaiandurilwaymoapplied-intuitionanthropicshield-aiscaleainebiuszooxsnowflakecognitiondatadog
36Model context protocol (MCP) 47 cos
Appears in postings at 47 of 188 companies (108 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiandurilanthropicscaleainebiuszooxwritersnowflakecognitiondatadogdeepgram
37JAX 43 cos
Appears in postings at 43 of 188 companies (124 postings). Most postings at:
openaiandurilwaymoapplied-intuitionanthropicnebiuszooxwriterdatadogcoheremotionalcloudflare
38Scaling laws / research infra 19 cos
Appears in postings at 19 of 188 companies (43 postings). Most postings at:
databricksopenaiwaymoanthropicnebiusdeepgramcoherecerebraslovabletenstorrentnurotogether-ai
39Speech / audio ML 19 cos
Appears in postings at 19 of 188 companies (39 postings). Most postings at:
openaidecagondeepgramcoheresierratogether-aisynthesiaotter-aicrestabasetenretell1x
Tools & frameworks
Named tools that appear in the postings — languages, AI frameworks (LangChain, Ray, vLLM), data stack, and the model APIs themselves.
1C++ 75 cos
Appears in postings at 75 of 188 companies (597 postings). Most postings at:
1xagility-roboticsairbnbandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuitionastranisbasetenboxcerebrascharacter
2Claude / Anthropic API 67 cos
Appears in postings at 67 of 188 companies (238 postings). Most postings at:
affirmairbnbalphasenseambienceandurilanthropicapplied-intuitionarizeastronomerbasetenblockbox
3Java 64 cos
Appears in postings at 64 of 188 companies (316 postings). Most postings at:
1xairbnbandurilanthropicapplied-intuitionarizeattentiveboxcalendlycharacterchimecognition
4JavaScript 54 cos
Appears in postings at 54 of 188 companies (284 postings). Most postings at:
1xandurilarizebasetenblandboxchimeclickhousecloudflarecognitioncoherecoreweave
5Linux 52 cos
Appears in postings at 52 of 188 companies (207 postings). Most postings at:
1xagility-roboticsandurilapplied-intuitionastronomercerebrascirclecicloudflarecognitioncoherecoreweavecrusoe
6Spark 45 cos
Appears in postings at 45 of 188 companies (283 postings). Most postings at:
1xabnormal-securityaffirmairbnbairbyteandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuitionattentiveboxcalendly
7OpenAI API 44 cos
Appears in postings at 44 of 188 companies (240 postings). Most postings at:
affirmalphasenseambienceanyscalearizeartisanastronomerboxbraintrustbrexbrowserbasecoreweave
8Postgres 44 cos
Appears in postings at 44 of 188 companies (107 postings). Most postings at:
airbyteapplied-intuitionattentivecalendlycharacterchimeclickhousecloudflarecoherecoinbasedatabricksdeepgram
9Ray 40 cos
Appears in postings at 40 of 188 companies (96 postings). Most postings at:
affirmairbnbanyscaleapplied-intuitionattentivebasetenchimecoherecoreweavecrusoecursord-matrix
10Kafka 39 cos
Appears in postings at 39 of 188 companies (125 postings). Most postings at:
airbnbairbyteandurilarizeattentiveblockboxcharacterchimeclickhousecloudflarecoreweave
11Airflow 37 cos
Appears in postings at 37 of 188 companies (82 postings). Most postings at:
affirmairbnbandurilapplied-intuitionastronomerattentiveblockcalendlychimecognitioncrestacrusoe
12Cursor 36 cos
Appears in postings at 36 of 188 companies (96 postings). Most postings at:
affirmambienceapplied-intuitionbasetenblockboxcalendlycognitioncoreweavecursordatabricksdatadog
13LangChain 36 cos
Appears in postings at 36 of 188 companies (84 postings). Most postings at:
abridgeaffirmalphasenseandurilarizeartisancoinbasecoreweavedatabricksdeepgramdockerdrata
14Modal 35 cos
Appears in postings at 35 of 188 companies (80 postings). Most postings at:
agility-roboticsairbnbandurilanyscaleapplied-intuitionartisanbasetencognitiondecagondoordashfairefigure
15Node.js 34 cos
Appears in postings at 34 of 188 companies (92 postings). Most postings at:
andurilanthropicarizeartisanboxcalendlyclickhousecoreweavecrestadatabricksdeepgramdrata
16TensorRT 33 cos
Appears in postings at 33 of 188 companies (88 postings). Most postings at:
abridgeandurilanyscaleapplied-intuitionbasetencerebrascloudflarecoherecoreweaved-matrixdeepgramdoordash
17Bash/shell 33 cos
Appears in postings at 33 of 188 companies (83 postings). Most postings at:
andurilapplied-intuitionastronomercloudflarecoinbasecoreweavecrusoed-matrixdatabricksdatadogdeepgramdexterity
18Snowflake 32 cos
Appears in postings at 32 of 188 companies (103 postings). Most postings at:
affirmastronomerblockchimeclickhousedatabricksdrataextendfairefigmagammagrafana
19NVIDIA (hardware) 32 cos
Appears in postings at 32 of 188 companies (80 postings). Most postings at:
abridgeagility-roboticsandurilapplied-intuitionbasetenblandcoreweavecrusoecursord-matrixdeepgramdexterity
20vLLM 31 cos
Appears in postings at 31 of 188 companies (91 postings). Most postings at:
abridgeanyscalebasetencartesiacerebrascloudflarecoherecoreweavecrusoed-matrixdatabricksdoordash
21Claude Code 31 cos
Appears in postings at 31 of 188 companies (76 postings). Most postings at:
affirmambienceanthropicapplied-intuitionbasetenblockboxdatabricksdatadogdockerdoordashfaire
22NVIDIA Triton 29 cos
Appears in postings at 29 of 188 companies (64 postings). Most postings at:
abridgeanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuitionbasetencartesiacerebrascloudflarecoreweaved-matrixdatabricksdeepgram
23Triton (kernel lang / inference server) 29 cos
Appears in postings at 29 of 188 companies (64 postings). Most postings at:
abridgeanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuitionbasetencartesiacerebrascloudflarecoreweaved-matrixdatabricksdeepgram
24Salesforce 29 cos
Appears in postings at 29 of 188 companies (59 postings). Most postings at:
andurilartisanboxclickhousecloudflarecrestadatabricksdeepgramdockerelasticelevenlabsgitlab
25Prometheus 28 cos
Appears in postings at 28 of 188 companies (47 postings). Most postings at:
anyscalearizeastronomercerebrascloudflarecoreweavecrusoed-matrixdeepgramelastichelsingkrea
26Grafana 25 cos
Appears in postings at 25 of 188 companies (88 postings). Most postings at:
cerebrascloudflarecoreweavecrusoed-matrixdeepgramdexteritygrafanahelsinglangchainlovablenavan
27Temporal 25 cos
Appears in postings at 25 of 188 companies (71 postings). Most postings at:
airbyteapplied-intuitionastronomercrestadratafigmafiguregrafanahelsinginstacartlovablelumalabs
28Hugging Face 25 cos
Appears in postings at 25 of 188 companies (55 postings). Most postings at:
alphasenseattentivebasetencerebrascirclecicoherecrestadatabricksfactoryfigmagustoideogram
29Databricks 24 cos
Appears in postings at 24 of 188 companies (317 postings). Most postings at:
abnormal-securityastronomerblockcursordatabrickse2bfairegrafanaheygeninstacartlovablemercor
30Redis 24 cos
Appears in postings at 24 of 188 companies (50 postings). Most postings at:
attentivecalendlychimedockerfiguregitlabhebbiaklaviyokrealangchainlumalabsmem0
31Dbt 24 cos
Appears in postings at 24 of 188 companies (36 postings). Most postings at:
affirmastronomerchimeclickhousecognitioncursordatabricksdeepgramextendfactorygammainstacart
32GitHub Copilot 23 cos
Appears in postings at 23 of 188 companies (60 postings). Most postings at:
applied-intuitionblockcalendlyclickhousecognitioncoreweavedatadogdockerelasticfigmagrafanahex
33SGLang 23 cos
Appears in postings at 23 of 188 companies (60 postings). Most postings at:
basetencartesiacerebrascloudflarecoherecoreweavecrusoed-matrixdatabricksdoordashetchedfireworks-ai
34LangGraph 23 cos
Appears in postings at 23 of 188 companies (52 postings). Most postings at:
affirmairbytearizeboxcoinbasecoreweavedatabricksdockerdrataelasticgitlabgong
35Gemini 23 cos
Appears in postings at 23 of 188 companies (38 postings). Most postings at:
coherecoinbasecoreweavedatabricksextendgrafanagustoklaviyomongodbnavanpinterestretell
36Slurm 22 cos
Appears in postings at 22 of 188 companies (51 postings). Most postings at:
andurilcoherecoreweavecrusoecursord-matrixdatabricksdatadogdeepgramfigurehelsingmidjourney
37Elasticsearch 20 cos
Appears in postings at 20 of 188 companies (50 postings). Most postings at:
astronomerboxclickhousedatabricksdeepgramdoordashelasticfigurehebbiaheygeninstacartmercor
38S3 20 cos
Appears in postings at 20 of 188 companies (33 postings). Most postings at:
agility-roboticscoreweavedatabricksdeepgramdratafactoryfairehebbialumalabsnavanotter-aipalantir
39Datadog 19 cos
Appears in postings at 19 of 188 companies (76 postings). Most postings at:
agility-roboticsattentiveblandcrusoed-matrixdatadogdeepgramfaireinstacartlangchainmercornavan
40Helm 19 cos
Appears in postings at 19 of 188 companies (45 postings). Most postings at:
arizeattentivecerebrascoherecoreweavecrusoedeepgramdockerhumelangchainnebiuspathai
Responsibilities
What the job actually is, in the postings' own words — this is what behavioral interview questions are made from.
1Own work end-to-end 173 cos
Appears in postings at 173 of 188 companies (1997 postings). Most postings at:
1xabnormal-securityabridgeaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbytealphasenseambienceandurilanthropicanyscale
2Rapid prototyping and iteration 166 cos
Appears in postings at 166 of 188 companies (1358 postings). Most postings at:
1xabnormal-securityabridgeaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbytealphasenseambienceandurilanthropicanyscale
3Evaluate and improve model quality 163 cos
Appears in postings at 163 of 188 companies (1074 postings). Most postings at:
1xabridgeaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbytealphasenseambienceandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuition
4Cross-functional collaboration 159 cos
Appears in postings at 159 of 188 companies (1624 postings). Most postings at:
1xabnormal-securityabridgeaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbyteambienceandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuition
5Write design docs / RFCs 158 cos
Appears in postings at 158 of 188 companies (1089 postings). Most postings at:
1xabnormal-securityaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbytealphasenseambienceandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuition
6Work directly with customers 157 cos
Appears in postings at 157 of 188 companies (1540 postings). Most postings at:
1xabnormal-securityaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbytealphasenseandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuitionarize
7Scale systems and optimize performance 146 cos
Appears in postings at 146 of 188 companies (966 postings). Most postings at:
1xabnormal-securityabridgeaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbalphasenseambienceandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuition
8Production operations / on-call 142 cos
Appears in postings at 142 of 188 companies (920 postings). Most postings at:
1xabridgeaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbyteambienceandurilanthropicapplied-intuitionarizeartisan
9Design system architecture 131 cos
Appears in postings at 131 of 188 companies (939 postings). Most postings at:
1xabnormal-securityabridgeaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbytealphasenseambienceandurilanthropicanyscale
10Set technical direction / roadmap 127 cos
Appears in postings at 127 of 188 companies (814 postings). Most postings at:
abnormal-securityaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbytealphasenseandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuitionartisanassemblyai
11Mentor and grow engineers 126 cos
Appears in postings at 126 of 188 companies (843 postings). Most postings at:
abridgeaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbalphasenseandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuitionarizeassemblyaiattentive
12Take models/prototypes to production 120 cos
Appears in postings at 120 of 188 companies (560 postings). Most postings at:
abnormal-securityabridgeaffirmairbnbalphasenseandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuitionarizeartisanastranis
13Build and maintain data pipelines 101 cos
Appears in postings at 101 of 188 companies (499 postings). Most postings at:
1xabnormal-securityaffirmagility-roboticsairbnbairbytealphasenseandurilanthropicanyscaleapplied-intuitionastronomer
Bar = share of companies (within each section) whose postings mention it. Click any row for the companies hiring for it.
Now prep for what they actually ask
Every topic above maps to interview questions. Start with the AI Engineer question bank or generate a set for your exact interview.
Methodology & FAQ
Postings collected 2026-08-05 from public Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby job boards. Titles filtered to AI-engineering-adjacent roles (AI/ML/LLM engineer, MLOps, forward-deployed, agent engineering); research-scientist and non-technical roles excluded. Repeated company boilerplate is stripped before topic counting. Big-tech companies with custom career sites (Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia) are not included. Refreshed monthly.
What skills do AI engineers need in 2026?
Based on 2,855 job postings at 188 companies: Python and LLM experience (required at ~8 in 10 companies), building agents, API/backend engineering, observability, evals/benchmarking, and inference optimization. Classic ML research skills are asked for far less often than production LLM-systems skills.
Is RAG still an in-demand skill?
RAG appears at 70 of 188 companies — real but mid-tier demand. Evals and agents appear at roughly twice as many companies.
What data is this based on?
2,855 AI-engineering-adjacent postings scraped 2026-08-05 from the public job boards (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby) of 188 companies, from frontier labs to robotics and consumer tech. Company boilerplate is stripped before counting so a topic only counts when the job itself asks for it.
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