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AI Career Compass · role
Decides what AI products should do, designs them and runs the programs that ship them. Product managers, designers and technical program managers working on AI products or research.
Measured In our tracked sample, AI product, design and program roles are 108 of 1,694 AI postings, or about 6%.1
Measured These postings most often ask for communication, asked for in 48 of 108, and product thinking, asked for in 39 of 108.12
Written by an AI analyst (claude-opus-5-5) and checked by code against the numbers it cites.
What these postings say the work involves, counted from their lists of duties. A posting can list several.
Out of these 108 postings. “Asked for” adds required, one of several options, and listed; preferred is counted apart.
Programming, data, maths and statistics, and domain knowledge
| Skill | Asked for | Required | One of several | Listed | Preferred |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SQL | 7 of 108 | 2 | 0 | 5 | 1 |
| Software engineering practice | 6 of 108 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
| Data analysis | 6 of 108 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 2 |
| Python | 4 of 108 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 3 |
| Health and medicine | 2 of 108 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Statistics and probability | 2 of 108 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Finance | 1 of 108 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Law and legal work | 1 of 108 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
Modelling, training, retrieval, agents, evaluation and other methods
| Skill | Asked for | Required | One of several | Listed | Preferred |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Machine learning | 29 of 108 | 10 | 0 | 19 | 9 |
| Large language models | 26 of 108 | 7 | 1 | 18 | 10 |
| AI agents | 19 of 108 | 2 | 0 | 17 | 15 |
| Evaluation (evals) | 13 of 108 | 3 | 2 | 8 | 5 |
| Building AI-powered products | 10 of 108 | 4 | 1 | 5 | 1 |
| Fine-tuning and post-training | 4 of 108 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 5 |
| Experiments and A/B tests | 4 of 108 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 2 |
| Search, ranking and recommendation | 3 of 108 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
Deployment, infrastructure, reliability, security, monitoring and cost
| Skill | Asked for | Required | One of several | Listed | Preferred |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability and incident response | 10 of 108 | 1 | 0 | 9 | 3 |
| Backend services and APIs | 8 of 108 | 3 | 0 | 5 | 4 |
| Performance and latency | 7 of 108 | 2 | 0 | 5 | 1 |
| Distributed systems | 7 of 108 | 1 | 0 | 6 | 1 |
| Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) | 6 of 108 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 3 |
| MLOps and ML platforms | 6 of 108 | 2 | 0 | 4 | 3 |
| Monitoring and observability | 5 of 108 | 2 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
| System design and architecture | 5 of 108 | 2 | 0 | 3 | 1 |
Publishing and leading research
| Skill | Asked for | Required | One of several | Listed | Preferred |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leading research | 3 of 108 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 1 |
| Open-source contributions | 2 of 108 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
Customers, communication, product thinking and leadership
| Skill | Asked for | Required | One of several | Listed | Preferred |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Communication | 48 of 108 | 10 | 0 | 38 | 7 |
| Product thinking | 39 of 108 | 9 | 0 | 30 | 11 |
| Working with customers | 10 of 108 | 4 | 0 | 6 | 7 |
| Leading and mentoring | 9 of 108 | 6 | 0 | 3 | 5 |
| Technical writing | 7 of 108 | 3 | 0 | 4 | 1 |
AI rules, policy and trust and safety
| Skill | Asked for | Required | One of several | Listed | Preferred |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Risk and compliance | 10 of 108 | 5 | 0 | 5 | 4 |
| Trust and safety | 2 of 108 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| AI governance and regulation | 1 of 108 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Measured Experience with AI agents is listed as preferred, meaning welcome but not required, in 15 of 108 postings.1
Measured Experience with large language models is listed as preferred in 10 of 108 postings.1
Employers list these as preferred. That they ask does not show that these skills decide who is hired.
The systems these postings expect people to build, run or work within.
Only what the postings state. Most do not say everything, so each number has its own count of postings.
57 of 108 postings state a minimum; the median is 5 years.
21 of 108 postings state a degree; 13 of them accept equivalent experience instead.
11 postings are remote. Of these, 11 name where you must live or work from, 0 do not say, and 0 say anywhere.
What employers advertise, grouped only when the ranges are comparable. Not a prediction of what you would earn.
Measured For full-time jobs in the US, the median of advertised range midpoints is 280,000 USD per year in base pay, from 29 comparable disclosures.12
85 of 108 postings (79%) advertise a pay range. Employers that publish ranges may differ from those that do not, and some places require it by law, so these ranges do not describe all pay.
| Group of alike ranges | Postings | Median of range midpoints | Middle half of midpoints |
|---|---|---|---|
| USD, a year, base pay, United States, full-time9 employers | 29 | $280,000 | $242,500 to $285,000 |
This is advertised pay, not what anyone earns. We pool ranges only when currency, pay period, pay type, country and employment type are the same, and only with at least 10 of them. Nothing is converted. 56 other ranges could not be pooled (period not stated, several countries, or too few alike).
Advice built from what these 108 postings ask for. Tick what you can already do; we suggest up to three steps and one portfolio project, each with the requirement behind it and a way to show the result.
Analysis Tracking began on 6 October 2026, so the window holds one reading of these 108 postings so far, and it cannot show a trend yet.1
Measured The AI postings we track come from 46 employers that publish their jobs through public feeds, so they are a sample, not the whole job market.1
Measured Only 18 of 108 postings were first published in the 30 days before the data cutoff, and 8 of 108 are more than a year old, so many open listings are not new.12
How everything is counted: our method. All roles: AI Career Compass.