The top 10 jobs in the 2026 AI job market, by the hiring data

The ten at a glance

	Job	What the data shows	Median pay
1	AI security engineer	US postings up 268.3% this year, to 2,409	$140,000 advertised
2	Data scientist	Third-fastest-growing US job through 2035	$120,230
3	AI engineer	No. 1 on LinkedIn’s fastest-growing list	Not published
4	GTM engineer	Postings up 205% in 2025, counted with RevOps	$127,500 advertised
5	AI consultant and strategist	No. 2 on LinkedIn’s list	Not published
6	Information security analyst	Jobs projected to grow 21% by 2035	$129,180
7	AI governance, risk and compliance lead	426 open roles in mid-September	$146,000 advertised
8	Influencer marketer	Fastest-growing marketing role in 2025, up 18%	Not published
9	Marketing manager	Jobs projected to grow 7% by 2035, twice the average	$166,790
10	AI red-team specialist	88 open roles in mid-September	$124,000 advertised

Pay marked “advertised” is the median salary in job postings: SANS’s count for the security roles, Bloomberry’s for GTM engineers. The rest is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) median pay for everyone in the job in 2025.

The ten jobs

No. 1: AI security engineer

AI security engineers protect the models, agents and AI tools a company runs: what an agent may touch, whether instructions hidden in a web page can steer it, and whether the packages it installs are what they claim to be. CyberSN counted 2,409 US postings from January to September 2026, up 268.3% on the same months of 2025, faster than any other role it tracks. SANS counted 856 open AI and ML security engineer roles in the week of September 14, at a median advertised $140,000, with Amazon, Mastercard, PepsiCo and SpaceX among the employers. A narrower title, AI supply chain security engineer, had 93 openings at $151,000. It’s the job LiteLLM’s poisoned release on October 21 was about.

No. 2: Data scientist

The BLS projects data scientist jobs to grow 35% from 2025 to 2035, the third-fastest of any occupation after nurse practitioners and solar installers, at a median $120,230. It expects computer and math jobs to grow largely from “the continued proliferation of digital tools and AI solutions.” Security teams want them too: CyberSN’s count of cyber data scientist postings rose 203.5% this year, to 1,493.

No. 3: AI engineer

AI engineers build and ship systems on top of AI models, and LinkedIn lists LangChain, retrieval-augmented generation and PyTorch as their most common skills. The title tops LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise, and the people starting it most often came from software engineer, data scientist and full-stack engineer jobs, with a median 3.7 years of experience. It’s also where software hiring is coming back: Indeed found that 37% of the rise in US software development postings from May 2025 to May 2026 came from jobs with AI in the title. A close relative, the forward deployed engineer, builds AI systems alongside a customer’s own team. Indeed’s data for India showed those postings up nearly 19-fold from June 2025 to June 2026, Analytics India Magazine reported.

No. 4: GTM engineer

A go-to-market engineer is a marketer or sales operator who writes code, wiring AI and automation tools into how a company finds and reaches customers. Bloomberry analyzed 1,000 of the postings. It found that GTM engineering and RevOps postings together grew 205% from January–September 2024 to the same months of 2025, that SQL and Python each appear in 38% of GTM engineer postings, and that the median advertised salary was $127,500. Clay is the tool the postings name most, then HubSpot, Outreach and Salesforce. Of the ten, it’s the clearest case of a marketing job that now expects code.

No. 5: AI consultant and strategist

AI consultants help companies decide where AI fits and how to roll it out. The title is No. 2 on LinkedIn’s list, and it’s a later-career move: the median person starting it had 8.2 years of experience, and the most common earlier jobs were founder, software engineer and product manager.

No. 6: Information security analyst

Analysts are the defenders who watch for attacks, sort through the flood of new vulnerabilities, and make sure the fixes land. The BLS projects their jobs to grow 21% by 2035, from 192,900 to about 233,500, with about 14,100 openings a year, at a median $129,180. It names “increased use of artificial intelligence (AI)” as one reason. This year’s postings haven’t followed: CyberSN counted 30.5% fewer security analyst postings than in 2025. Section 3 explains the gap.

No. 7: AI governance, risk and compliance lead

This is the auditor’s job, for AI: deciding which AI tools a company may use and with what data, and showing regulators and customers that it holds. SANS counted 426 open roles in mid-September at a median $146,000, at employers including JPMorgan Chase, Leidos and Aramark. “Nearly every large enterprise is deploying AI, and most are doing it without dedicated AI security staff,” SANS wrote. Lawyers are in demand too: cybersecurity and privacy attorney postings rose 9.1% this year, one of the few security titles CyberSN tracks to grow. The rules keep arriving. The EU AI Act’s transparency duties for new AI systems have applied since August 2, 2026, and an amendment that took effect in July moved its rules for high-risk systems, such as AI used in hiring or lending, to December 2, 2027, as Cooley summarizes.

No. 8: Influencer marketer

Influencer marketer roles grew 10% in 2024 and 18% in 2025, the fastest of any marketing role, in an analysis of global job postings in the American Marketing Association’s 2026 State of Marketing Careers. The marketers it surveyed ranked influencer marketing last of 37 skills, a gap the AMA calls one of its “most striking findings.”

No. 9: Marketing manager

Marketing managers decide what a company says, to whom and where, and judge whether it worked. The BLS projects their jobs to grow 7% by 2035, twice the 3.5% average for all jobs, at a median $166,790, and Robert Half lists marketing manager among the marketing roles in highest demand in 2026. AI is becoming part of the job description: Indeed found AI mentioned in 14.9% of marketing postings at the end of 2025, up from 8.4% at its start.

No. 10: AI red-team specialist

Red teamers attack AI systems on purpose, to find prompt injections, jailbreaks and agents that leave their task before someone else does. SANS counted 88 open roles in mid-September at a median $124,000, at employers including Cloudflare and Lucid Motors. The numbers are small, and the work is real: in July, the UK AI Security Institute’s testers caught Claude Mythos 5 trying to slip malware into a real GitHub project, which our memo covers. Classic offensive security is hiring less. CyberSN counted 45.9% fewer penetration tester postings this year, and 30.5% fewer red teamer postings.

Security is hiring for AI, and less for everything else

Security work is piling up. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group counted 5,045 newly disclosed vulnerabilities in January 2026 and 10,740 in August, and 141 exploited from January to August, more than in all of 2025. Half of the flaws it believes AI found allow remote code execution, against 26% of all disclosed flaws. AI writes flawed code too: in Veracode’s tests, published July 28, models failed the security check in nearly 44% of coding tasks. In April, the Cloud Security Alliance warned that “AI has materially accelerated vulnerability discovery while defenders have not yet matched that speed operationally.” This month alone brought a breach at OpenCode Console, a credential stealer in LiteLLM, and the full account of Mythos 5’s test.

The postings tell a different story so far. CyberSN counted 235,786 US cybersecurity postings from January to September 2026, 26.4% fewer than in the same months of 2025 and “the lowest January to September in four years.” Role by role:

Security role	Postings, Jan–Sep 2026	Change from 2025
AI security engineer	2,409	+268.3%
Cyber data scientist	1,493	+203.5%
Cryptography and PKI professional	2,497	+22.8%
Cybersecurity and privacy attorney	24,193	+9.1%
Vulnerability and threat management analyst	1,033	+0.2%
Security researcher (software)	763	−18.6%
Governance, risk and compliance analyst	4,697	−26.6%
Security analyst	24,095	−30.5%
Red teamer	2,726	−30.5%
Security engineer	44,083	−32.3%
Penetration tester	3,063	−45.9%

Two readings fit the numbers. First, 2025 was an unusually strong year, and 2026 is back near 2024’s 244,911, so some of the drop is a return to normal. Second, employers are hiring for AI first. The share of security postings that mention AI reached 20.0% in September, the highest month since January 2025, and several roles picked up from the second quarter to the third, among them security engineer (+7.9%), governance, risk and compliance analyst (+9.5%) and CISO (+19.5%).

So for security researchers, testers and auditors, today’s openings are mostly in the AI versions of those jobs. The BLS still expects analyst jobs to grow 21% over the decade.

Marketing hires fewer doers and more builders

The argument for marketing goes like this: when agents can write the code, the scarce work is deciding what to build and getting it in front of people. The data supports a narrower version of it. Marketing is hiring people who plan, measure and build, and fewer people who produce.

• Overall, marketing is still down. Marketing jobs are 27% below pre-pandemic levels, the AMA reports from Indeed’s data, though “the number of employers hiring has increased.” Senior and strategic roles are holding steady while execution-focused ones decline. The BLS projects marketing manager jobs to grow 7% by 2035, and advertising and promotions manager jobs to shrink 4%.
• Production roles are shrinking. In the AMA’s analysis, content marketer roles fell 11% in 2025, and SEO specialists fell 15%, the steepest decline of any marketing role it tracked.
• The builders are growing. GTM engineering postings grew 205% in 2025, counted with RevOps, and more than a third of GTM engineer postings name SQL or Python.
• People are crossing over in both directions. On LinkedIn’s list, the most common skills of new data annotators, who label data to train AI models, are SEO copywriting and content marketing, and they most often came from content manager and editor jobs. Founders, No. 9 on the list, count brand development and software development among their most common skills.

Does “anyone can code” mean fewer engineers?

Not for experienced ones, so far. Indeed found US software development postings up almost 15% from Claude Code’s launch in late February 2025 to mid-2026, while all postings fell 7%. Indeed’s Guillermo Gallacher wrote that the link between AI exposure and job postings “appears to be flipping, from job destruction to job creation.” Software postings are still about 27.5% below their pre-pandemic level, though, and the rebound is senior: 71% of the rise from May 2025 to May 2026 came from senior roles. In the first quarter of 2026, 4.5% of software development postings were entry-level, the lowest share of any sector Indeed measured, and 69.3% were senior.

The BLS projects software developer jobs to grow 10% by 2035, about 174,700 more, at a median $135,980, and software quality assurance analysts and testers 6%. Computer programmer jobs shrink 7%, because “computer programming work continues to be automated.”

What’s changing is the share of the work that’s checking. “AI-generated code needs to be treated like any unreviewed code,” said Veracode co-founder Chris Wysopal. The more people who can build, the more there is to review, secure and get in front of customers.

What’s shrinking

• Office and administrative support loses 752,100 jobs by 2035, 4.0%, the largest loss of any group in the BLS projections, which name automation tools “including those powered by AI.”
• Sales shrinks 1.4%, or 206,800 jobs, with e-commerce and AI sales tools among the causes, the BLS says.
• Computer programmers fall 7%, and advertising and promotions managers 4%.
• Entry-level postings across the US were down 7.5% from a year earlier in May 2026, Indeed found.
• Classic security roles fell in this year’s postings: penetration testers 45.9%, threat hunters 40.0% and cyber insider threat analysts 55.6%, per CyberSN.
• Marketing production fell in 2025: SEO specialists 15% and content marketers 11%, per the AMA.

How to move toward one of these jobs

1. In security, learn how AI fails. The fast-growing titles are about AI’s own risks: agents with too much access, instructions hidden in content, poisoned packages. SANS updates its tracker weekly, so you can see which titles are hiring before you train for one.
2. In software, show experience and AI. Indeed’s numbers say senior roles and AI titles carry the rebound. Build with agents, and show that you review and secure what they write.
3. In marketing, learn to build. More than a third of GTM engineer postings name SQL or Python. Start by automating a piece of your own work, such as cleaning a lead list or drafting briefs from a call transcript.
4. Early in a career, show real work. Entry-level postings are down 7.5% in a year, and 4.5% of software postings are entry-level, so a security write-up, a tool you built or a campaign you ran says more than a list of courses.

If you’re learning to build, Enjoy runs Claude Code, Codex and the other labs’ agents on the plan you already have. Describe a small tool in a conversation, such as a page that cleans up a lead list, and once the agent has built it, it’s one click away in Tools. Enjoy is free.

How the ten were picked

No single source covers jobs this new, so this list leans mainly on five, each read on October 25, 2026:

• This year’s postings. CyberSN’s Cybersecurity Jobs Report counts US security job postings from January to September 2026. The SANS Institute’s job market tracker counts open AI security roles each week. Indeed’s Hiring Lab tracks software development and seniority.
• Who moved into which jobs. LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise 2026 ranks job titles by how fast its members started them from January 2023 to July 2025.
• The ten-year outlook. The BLS published its 2025–35 projections on August 27, 2026.

The ten are ordered by how strongly that data backs each one, with recent growth in postings counting most. Postings measure what employers advertise, not who gets hired, and the newest titles are small, so a fast percentage can mean a few thousand jobs.