Originally published on NodJobs, where we track live remote jobs open to US applicants.
Search for "AI jobs" and you mostly get machine learning engineers. So we read every live remote job title on NodJobs this week and counted the ones that mention AI, machine learning, LLMs, generative or agentic AI, MLOps or applied science. The result looks less like an engineering trend and more like a change in how whole companies hire.
The numbers at a glance
- About 7% of open remote jobs mention AI in the title, and the share is rising: close to 9% of jobs posted in the last 7 days.
- 44% of AI-titled roles sit outside the AI & machine learning field itself, most of them in non-engineering teams.
- These roles are unusually open about pay: about three in four publish a salary, and the median posted range is $239,000 a year.
- Very few are open worldwide. Almost all are remote for US-based candidates.
Where AI shows up outside engineering
| Field | A real title from this week |
|---|---|
| Sales | Senior AI Solution Sales Executive (Instacart) |
| Product | AI Product Manager, Growth Marketing (Notion) |
| Marketing | Agentic Operator, Growth Marketing (CircleCI) |
| Customer Support | AI Agent Support Specialist (Vanta) |
| Legal Ops | Senior Legal Operations Specialist, AI & Automation (Samsara) |
| HR | People Systems, Analytics, and AI Manager (LaunchDarkly) |
Sales is the biggest group. Samsara lists Specialist Seller roles for its AI products at $350,000 a year, and Datadog is hiring sales engineers for AI accounts at $149,000–$200,000.
Titles you may not have seen before
- Forward Deployed Engineer (AI Enablement) at Reddit, $180,200–$272,400: engineers who sit with teams to put AI tools to work.
- Agentic Operator at CircleCI, $118,500–$171,000: a marketer who runs campaigns with AI agents.
- Director, Internal AI Operations at LaunchDarkly, $269,400–$370,480: changing how the company itself works with AI.
- Offensive AI Security Engineer at Samsara, $157,675–$238,500: attacking AI systems to find their weak spots.
Does "AI" in the title pay more?
Inside AI & machine learning engineering, yes: the median posted salary is $272,675. Outside it, not clearly. AI-titled product and software roles pay about the same as their peers, and AI-titled sales roles pay a little less. It is an early read we will keep tracking every week.
Automation: the more approachable side
AI roles often come with a second word: automation. Titles like Legal Operations Specialist (AI & Automation), Digital Customer Success Manager, AI & Automation and Finance Systems Analyst, Integrations and Automation sit in operations teams, with a median posted salary around $116,000. If you already build workflows, integrations or internal tooling, these titles describe work you are doing.
A lesson from Klarna
In February 2024, Klarna announced that its new AI assistant was handling the workload of about 700 support staff. About a year later, its CEO told Bloomberg the company was hiring human support staff again, fully remote, because quality had suffered. The jobs above follow the same pattern: companies are not only automating work, they are hiring people to run, sell, secure and improve that automation.
How to get in if you're not an ML engineer
- Start in your own field. About a third of AI-titled roles are in sales, product, marketing, support, finance and HR.
- Search with the words employers use: "AI", "agentic", "AI enablement", "AI operations", "forward deployed", "automation".
- Read what the AI part means. Sometimes AI is the product you sell or support; sometimes it is how the team works.
- Don't assume a raise. Compare the posted range with similar roles.
- Check where you can work from. Most AI roles are US-only remote.
The full report, with every table and the method, is on NodJobs. You can also browse live remote AI & machine learning jobs.
