TL;DRAI is spawning new job titles from Claude Evangelist ($240K) to vibe coder ($108K) even as it eliminates the roles they’re replacing.
AI companies are not just changing the way people work. They are changing the kinds of roles that exist. Org charts are morphing as an entirely new class of jobs emerges, some with titles that did not exist two years ago, others that represent old professions reborn inside the technology industry. The hiring sprees stand in stark contrast to the layoffs that many of the same companies are citing AI as the justification for.
The range is striking. Companies are looking for everything from one of the oldest intellectual pursuits, philosophy, to an entirely new category of work spawned by generative AI coding tools, the professional vibe coder. Between those poles sit forward deployed engineers, AI accelerators, evangelists, gig workers training models, and a growing class of C-suite officers whose entire job is to make sure the rest of the company uses AI.
The forward deployed engineer is the hottest role in the category. Popularised by Palantir in the 2010s, the job embeds a specialised engineer directly with a customer to deliver tailored AI solutions rather than off-the-shelf software. Indeed data shows that job postings for forward deployed engineers in January 2026 were roughly 19 times the volume of the year before. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has compared the role to a seasoned waiter in a French restaurant, combining deep product knowledge with exquisite service. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon Web Services, and Palantir are all hiring, with starting salaries ranging from $115,000 to more than $200,000. Salesforce’s projected $300 million in Anthropic token spending this year illustrates the scale of enterprise AI adoption these engineers are being hired to support.
