Layoff headlines travel faster than job openings, which is why a small independent project that simply counts, every morning, deserves a closer read this week. Prof H Lab’s AI Jobs Tracker reads the public job-board feeds of twenty AI, robotics and autonomy employers directly — no aggregators, no scraping of third-party sites — and its 21 October reading logged 3,826 open roles across those boards, alongside a run of high-profile cuts elsewhere in tech.
The same week, Reuters-reported eBay layoffs of about 1,000 staff — the marketplace’s second restructuring round of 2026 — sat at the top of the jobs feed. Both things are the labour market right now. Only one of them is a number you can check each morning.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
The companies doing the most to reshape other industries’ work are advertising thousands of open jobs on their own career pages, with unusually transparent pay: 2,214 of 3,826 postings print a salary range, and the frontier labs’ median bands sit near or above a quarter million US dollars. It is a narrow, skewed snapshot of one hot sector — not the whole labour market — but it is the most concrete, re-checkable counterpoint to the layoff-led narrative available this week, and it helps explain where globally mobile AI talent is being bid for.
The Count, and How It Is Counted
The tracker’s methodology is deliberately boring, which is its virtue: every morning, one script reads each company’s own public feed (Greenhouse or Ashby), counts live postings, filters US versus overseas locations, and extracts printed salary ranges — with a documented note that Greenhouse double-escapes its HTML, which silently hides pay ranges from naive parsers. Counts move daily as postings close without notice, and the project states plainly that it is not a recruiter and takes no employer money.
The head of the table as of 21 October:
- OpenAI — 808 open roles, 645 in the US, 619 printing pay; median US band $252K–$380K
- Anthropic — 676, up nine on the day; 531 US; median band $305K–$400K
- Waymo — 365; median band $213K–$263K
- xAI — 302, down four; 280 US; band $178K–$315K
- Sierra — 189, up two; band $200K–$300K
- Scale AI — 176; band $190K–$257K
- Perplexity — 134, up one; band $200K–$290K
- Cognition — 105, up one; Cursor — 134; Replit — 54, down five
- Humanoid robotics: Figure AI 100, 1X 97, Apptronik 80, Agility Robotics 73 — collectively about 350 open roles at four humanoid-makers alone
Two details widen the lens beyond senior engineers. First, 175 entry-level US titles (technician, apprentice, intern) sit in the count — a reminder that the sector is not hiring only the ten-year veterans. Second, the day-over-day deltas are small and mostly negative — the boards are steady, not exploding — worth knowing before anyone cites this as a “hiring boom.” The entry-level count, meanwhile, gives a concrete figure to set beside the wider junior-pipeline gap our Stanford “canaries” coverage tracked: one sector’s pipeline choices are not the whole market’s, but they are visible.
The Wider Market the Count Sits Inside
JobRise’s 16 October listing scan — covering 104,289 open software and data & AI listings across nine countries — sets the scale. The single-country outlier is India: almost 3 in 10 of its open listings are software or data roles, and the biggest movers there are hiring graduates, not veterans. At TCS’s 8 October earnings call, chief HR officer Sudeep Kunnumal said the firm onboarded 10,000 fresh graduates in the quarter with about 24,000 in the half-year, and is “hiring to demand” in new technologies — attrition easing to 13.3 percent along the way.
Oyster’s Global AI Talent Report, released 14 October via Business Wire, captures the same pressure from the employer side: 95 percent of surveyed HR leaders say employees already use AI tools daily in roles where AI is not in the job description, two-thirds have added AI skill requirements to traditionally non-technical roles, and 53 percent of companies prefer to train existing staff rather than hire for AI skills externally. Reskilling, not poaching, is the stated default — even in a market with $300K median bands at the top.
Where the Caveats Sit
Three, and they matter. This tracker covers twenty employers, 81 percent US-based — a window onto one segment of one country’s hiring, not a global read; New Zealand’s AI-adjacent demand lives in a far smaller, different market, where our September SEEK analysis found record AI-skills mentions in just 4.2 percent of ads at far lower pay scales. The salary medians are printed ranges on live postings, not realised offers. And eBay’s ~1,000 cuts — like most of this year’s restructurings — were framed by the company as refocusing, not automation, so pairing the two stories is contrast, not causation.
The use of the number is modest and honest: if you are weighing a career bet on AI skills, the employers setting the frontier are visibly still staffing up, on the record, in public, with the pay printed. That does not promise anyone a role. It does put a live, checkable number next to the fear countdown.
FAQ
How many jobs are open at the biggest AI companies right now? A 21 October reading of the twenty AI, robotics and autonomy employers tracked by Prof H Lab’s AI Jobs Tracker counted 3,826 open roles across their public job boards — 3,083 in the US and 2,214 with printed salary ranges.
What do AI companies pay? Median printed US ranges at the frontier labs were $252K–$380K at OpenAI and $305K–$400K at Anthropic on that reading; Waymo’s band sat at $213K–$263K. Ranges are postings’ own published bands, not confirmed offers.
Are AI companies hiring entry-level workers? Yes — the same 21 October count includes 175 entry-level US titles such as technician, apprentice and intern, though entry-level roles are a small share of the total.
Is this evidence of an AI hiring boom? It is evidence of a steady, wide-open set of boards at the sector’s top employers — day-over-day changes were small and mostly negative on that reading. The broader market is genuinely mixed: the same week brought about 1,000 eBay layoff notices alongside continued graduate hiring at India’s IT giants.
What does this mean for New Zealand? Direct salary competition is limited — few NZ employers pay near those bands — but the global bid for AI skills feeds emigration and contract-rate pressure, and NZ’s own job-ad data shows AI-skills requirement at a record share of listings.
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
