Sources and method
94,840 postings in 186 monthly Hacker News threads, and 5,246 open roles matched on 131 job boards: where every number comes from and how titles are matched.
Hacker News Who is hiring
Every month since April 2011, Hacker News has an "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread where each top-level comment is one employer's posting. This site reads every thread through the free Algolia HN API and counts, for each title, the postings that mention it. A title's share is that count over the month's postings. Months with too few postings (December 2011 had one) are left out of shares. The thread leans towards startups and engineering, so it shows how titles spread, not how many people hold them.
Company job boards
Once a week (Mondays, 12:00 UTC) this site reads the public job boards of 131 data, AI and tech employers on Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever: one request per company, no scraping. Each posting's title is matched to a tracked title; open roles, companies and salaries come from these. A salary appears only when the posting itself states a base pay range in US dollars a year; the median is the middle of those ranges' midpoints.
The synonym map
Titles are matched with a fixed list of patterns, so "Forward Deployed Engineer", "Forward-Deployed Software Engineer" and "FDE" are one title. On job boards a posting gets the most specific title (a Staff ML Engineer counts as ML engineer). The spellings counted:
45 of 45 titles
| Title | Also counted |
|---|---|
| Forward Deployed Engineer | FDE, forward deployed, deployed engineer |
| Context Engineer | context engineering |
| Agent Engineer | AI agent engineer, agentic engineer |
| Evals Engineer | evaluation engineer, model evaluation |
| Prompt Engineer | prompt engineering |
| LLM Engineer | GenAI engineer, generative AI engineer |
| Applied AI Engineer | applied AI |
| AI Engineer | AI engineering, artificial intelligence engineer |
| MLOps Engineer | ML platform engineer, ML infrastructure, ML infra |
| Computer Vision Engineer | CV engineer, perception engineer |
| NLP Engineer | natural language processing |
| Deep Learning Engineer | DL engineer |
| Machine Learning Engineer | ML engineer, MLE |
| Analytics Engineer | analytics engineering, dbt |
| Data Engineer | data platform engineer, ETL developer |
| Big Data Engineer | hadoop developer, hadoop engineer |
| Data Scientist | data science |
| Data Analyst | BI analyst, business intelligence |
| Blockchain Engineer | web3 engineer, smart contract, solidity |
| Site Reliability Engineer | SRE, site reliability |
| DevOps Engineer | dev ops |
| Platform Engineer | infrastructure engineer, infra engineer |
| Security Engineer | appsec, infosec |
| Solutions Engineer | sales engineer, solutions architect, customer engineer |
| Developer Advocate | DevRel, developer relations, evangelist |
| Founding Engineer | first engineer, early engineer |
| Product Engineer | product-minded engineer |
| Design Engineer | UI engineer, design technologist |
| Full Stack Engineer | fullstack, full-stack developer |
| Member of Technical Staff | MTS, technical staff |
| Research Engineer | RE |
| Research Scientist | AI researcher, ML researcher |
| Applied Scientist | applied research |
| AI Safety Researcher | alignment researcher, interpretability, red team |
| AI Product Manager | AI PM, ML product manager |
| Data Product Manager | data PM |
| Technical Product Manager | TPM, platform PM |
| Product Manager | PM, product owner |
| Product Designer | UX designer, UI/UX |
| Chief AI Officer | CAIO, chief artificial intelligence officer |
| Chief Data Officer | CDO, CDAO, chief analytics officer |
| Head of AI | head of ML, VP of AI, director of machine learning |
| Head of Data | head of analytics, VP data, director of data science |
| Engineering Manager | EM, eng manager |
| Staff Engineer | principal engineer, staff software engineer |
Statuses
- Emerging: First seen in the last two years and still gaining.
- Rising: Share of postings up at least 25% on the six months before.
- Established: Steady share for years.
- Fading: The last year is under half of its best year.
"Took off" is the first month whose 12-month share reached a quarter of the title's best 12 months. "First seen" is the earliest posting that mentions it, linked, even if years passed before it caught on.
New titles
Job-board titles the map does not recognise are kept each week. One model call a week (Gemini, no web access) reads the most common of them, plus a few news headlines from a search API, and proposes new titles. A proposal is kept only when at least two open postings use its exact words; it is published as Unverified with a posting as evidence until checked by hand.
Across fru.dev
Company names and slugs follow the shared registry at companies.fru.dev; company pages link to the same company on sibling fru.dev sites.
Disclaimer
Counts from public job threads and job boards; a title's share is not the job market's size. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners. Postings belong to the employers that wrote them. Use Suggest a correction on any page.