2,331open agentic roles
66%of tracked AI hiring
193companies hiring
9%remote

Stats worth quoting

  • 2,331 open agentic AI roles across 193 companies in September 2026.
  • 66% of all tracked AI hiring is now specifically agentic — screened on the full job description, not the title.
  • Forward-deployed engineer is the most in-demand agentic role (417 openings, 18% of agentic demand).
  • Salesforce leads all employers with 142 agentic roles open.
  • Only 9% of agentic roles are remote — this is overwhelmingly in-office hiring.
  • The agent shift has reached the enterprise: Citi (56), Accenture (46), Capital One (44) are hiring agent builders directly.
  • "Forward-deployed engineer" has gone mainstream: 417 open postings, led by Databricks (96), Palantir (81), OpenAI (22).
  • "Prompt engineer" as a job title has all but vanished — just 2 of 3,515 postings mention "prompt". The work moved inside AI/ML engineering.
  • Agent-native skills are now table stakes: MCP appears in 588 postings and multi-agent architecture in 369.
  • Agentic hiring skews senior — only 110 of 2,331 agentic roles are junior or internships. Employers want people who can ship agents now.
  • Fastest-growing employer this month: Intercom (+101 agentic roles vs 2026-08).
  • Like-for-like agentic hiring rose 9.1% month-over-month across 188 consistently tracked companies.

Month-over-month movement vs 2026-08 · like-for-like across 188 companies

Intercom+101111 roles
Capital One+1744 roles
Verizon+1315 roles
CVS Health+1015 roles
JLL+920 roles
Anthropic+858 roles

Most in-demand agentic roles

Forward-deployed engineer417 · 18%
Software engineer311 · 13%
Agent engineer141 · 6%
AI product manager83 · 4%
AI security engineer76 · 3%
AI engineer73 · 3%
Applied AI / ML58 · 2%
AI solutions architect50 · 2%
ML engineer48 · 2%
Data scientist47 · 2%

Plus 764 agentic roles in general / company-specific engineering titles.

Top employers by open agentic roles

  1. Salesforce142
  2. Databricks136
  3. Intercom111
  4. Palantir81
  5. OpenAI78
  6. LangChain65
  7. Anthropic58
  8. Adobe57
  9. Citi56
  10. NVIDIA51

Frontier vs traditional employers

How much of each cohort's AI hiring is specifically agentic — where the agent shift has already reached, and where it is still arriving.

Frontier AI companies

69%

of 2,346 AI roles are agentic · 123 companies

Traditional enterprises

61%

of 1,169 AI roles are agentic · 70 companies

Traditional employers hiring agent builders directly: Citi (56), Accenture (46), Capital One (44), Amgen (44), Booz Allen (41).

Role mix by category

Agent engineering2,280 · 65%
AI/ML engineering823 · 23%
Agent ops & infra148 · 4%
AI product107 · 3%
Field & solutions59 · 2%
Evals & quality49 · 1%
AI security33 · 1%
AI governance & risk16 · 0%

Most-requested skills

Python1,633Cloud995RAG637Kubernetes594MCP588TypeScript473LangChain405Fine-tuning391Multi-agent369LangGraph331Prompt engineering314Vector DB312Evals288Tool use265

Seniority mix

mid42%
senior19%
staff+16%
manager16%
lead5%
intern2%

Updated from the snapshot of 28 September 2026. See the live index in depth, company tracker, or every monthly report.

Frequently asked questions

How many agentic AI jobs were open in September 2026?

In September 2026 the Agentic Ready Jobs Index tracked 2,331 open agentic AI roles — 66% of 3,515 tracked AI roles — across 193 companies. Every posting is classified on its full job description, not the title.

Which companies are hiring the most AI agent engineers?

The largest agentic employers this month are Salesforce (142), Databricks (136), Intercom (111), Palantir (81), OpenAI (78). The full company tracker lists every employer with live links to their careers pages.

Can I republish these numbers?

Yes. The full dataset and this report are published under CC BY 4.0 — cite "Agentic Ready Jobs Index, Prefactor" and link back to getreadyforagents.com/jobs. Machine-readable JSON and a press one-pager are linked at the foot of this report.

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