Intelligence Report

AI Sector Weekly Digest

A synthesis of hiring patterns and signals across the frontier AI landscape.

Week of Jan 19, 2026Current

Executive Summary

This week we tracked 1,841 open positions across 11 frontier AI companies.

Net change: +21 positions (+140 added, -119 removed).

Enterprise and sector-specific sales roles are spiking at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Scale AI, with rapid specialization by geography and industry vertical.

Expanding

Companies with increased hiring velocity

Scale AI, Anthropic, OpenAI

Contracting

Companies with slowing hiring

Cohere, Mistral

Trending Roles

Enterprise SalesCore Engineering (Platform & Infrastructure)Security Engineering/Red TeamingDirector-level Operations/People OpsRevenue Operations DirectorField Engineering ManagerPublic Sector & Partnerships LeadsAI Tutor/Trainer (RLHF)Staff/Senior Infrastructure EngineerSupply Chain/Manufacturing OperationsLegal CounselInterpretability Researcher

Skills in Demand

enterprise sales and GTM strategycloud/infrastructure engineeringsecurity engineering and threat intelligencepublic sector complianceLLM deployment and scalingAI safety and societal impact researchstrategic partnerships/business developmentdistributed systems/HPCinference optimizationvertical-specific sales (healthcare, federal, APAC)internal controls/finance for scalemodel interpretability/AI Tutor RLHF methods

Top Movers This Week

1.Anthropic

366 roles+51

2.OpenAI

484 roles+51

3.Scale AI

151 roles+12

4.Mistral

158 roles+8

5.xAI

277 roles+7

Sector Signals

•Security and red teaming hiring is surging across Anthropic, Fireworks AI, and xAI, demonstrating sector convergence around operational/model robustness.
•Director-level hires in revenue operations and infrastructure suggest a turn toward mature, large-scale operationalization—seen at OpenAI, Cohere, Scale AI, and Anthropic.
•Companies like Mistral and Cohere are pulling back on research and forward engineering, shifting to operational and financial controls as they scale.
•Manufacturing and supply chain operations become a hiring focus only at robotics-centric Figure AI, diverging from software-centric AI labs.
•Specialization within engineering (distributed storage, HPC, inferencing) is replacing generalist roles at Together AI and others.
•AI Tutor/Trainer (RLHF) hiring shows up again at xAI despite earlier annotation layoffs, indicating oscillation in RLHF/data staffing models.

Trending Roles

Skills in Demand

Sector Signals

•Security and red teaming hiring is surging across Anthropic, Fireworks AI, and xAI, demonstrating sector convergence around operational/model robustness.

•Director-level hires in revenue operations and infrastructure suggest a turn toward mature, large-scale operationalization—seen at OpenAI, Cohere, Scale AI, and Anthropic.

•Companies like Mistral and Cohere are pulling back on research and forward engineering, shifting to operational and financial controls as they scale.

•Manufacturing and supply chain operations become a hiring focus only at robotics-centric Figure AI, diverging from software-centric AI labs.

•Specialization within engineering (distributed storage, HPC, inferencing) is replacing generalist roles at Together AI and others.

•AI Tutor/Trainer (RLHF) hiring shows up again at xAI despite earlier annotation layoffs, indicating oscillation in RLHF/data staffing models.