The AI-Era Hiring Index: 2026 Q2
A snapshot of 3,502 open roles at 16 AI-native and high-growth employers, captured on 2026-04-14. First issue of a quarterly series.
Dataset released under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: “Four-Leaf AI-Era Hiring Index, 2026 Q2.”
Key findings
- 45% of the 3,502 JDs in this index disclose a salary range directly in the description text. Discord leads at 99%.
- Anthropic posts the highest median salary band in the index, at $290K to $365K (median of 307 disclosed roles).
- Python is the most-mentioned skill in engineering JDs across the index, named in 33% of roles.
- LLM or foundation-model experience is listed in 57% of data-and-ML JDs and 65% of research JDs. Once a specialty, now a default expectation at these employers.
- The “remote” flag reported by ATS systems does not match JD text. Across the index, ATS flags mark 25% of roles as remote while a text scan of descriptions matches 44%. Readers relying on ATS metadata alone are getting a distorted picture.
How this was built
Four-Leaf operates a nightly scraper against public ATS feeds (Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever) for a curated index of 16 AI-native and high-growth employers. On 2026-04-14, the snapshot captured 3,502 active roles. Role family, seniority, salary range, and skill mentions were extracted from JD text using a published keyword and regex taxonomy. Full methodology, including false-positive guards and seniority heuristics, is at four-leaf.ai/research/methodology.
What AI-era employers are hiring for
Role mix across the index skews engineering-heavy, with sales and operations as the largest non-technical buckets. A sizeable “other” bucket reflects roles whose titles don’t map cleanly to a family (cross-functional, domain-specific, or ambiguous wording).
| Role family | Roles | % of index |
|---|---|---|
| engineering | 891 | 25% |
| other | 782 | 22% |
| sales gtm | 624 | 18% |
| data ml | 333 | 9.5% |
| operations | 257 | 7.3% |
| marketing | 161 | 4.6% |
| finance legal | 146 | 4.2% |
| product | 132 | 3.8% |
| research | 69 | 2.0% |
| support | 51 | 1.5% |
| people | 29 | 0.8% |
| design | 27 | 0.8% |
Top skills in engineering roles
Mention rate across 891 engineering JDs. Skills are detected by case-insensitive whole-word matches; a skill is counted once per JD regardless of how many times it appears.
Top skills in data and ML roles
Mention rate across 333 data and ML JDs.
Salary transparency scorecard
A role is counted as salary-transparent when its description contains an extractable USD pay range (e.g. “$150,000 to $200,000” or “$150K–$200K”). Sanity bounds reject values below $30K and above $2M; context windows around each match filter out obvious non-salary dollar mentions (funding amounts, bonuses, equity refresh language). Medians are reported only where at least one role discloses a range; companies with zero disclosures appear as “not disclosed in JD” and almost certainly link to a separate comp page or pass ranges out-of-band.
| Company | Jobs | % disclosed | Median min | Median max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discord | 79 | 99% | $196K | $221K |
| Instacart | 133 | 91% | $176K | $186K |
| 142 | 82% | $150K | $300K | |
| Anthropic | 427 | 72% | $290K | $365K |
| Scale AI | 171 | 70% | $206K | $261K |
| Figma | 154 | 62% | $153K | $303K |
| DoorDash | 453 | 61% | $116K | $170K |
| Vercel | 78 | 60% | $196K | $280K |
| Airbnb | 236 | 53% | $191K | $225K |
| Notion | 155 | 51% | $180K | $220K |
| Datadog | 428 | 44% | $143K | $197K |
| Ramp | 130 | 12% | $128K | $182K |
| Stripe | 495 | 1.8% | $157K | $229K |
| Spotify | 176 | 0.0% | not in JD | not in JD |
| Coinbase | 147 | 0.0% | not in JD | not in JD |
| Plaid | 98 | 0.0% | not in JD | not in JD |
Medians are computed across each company’s disclosed-range subset; the sample size varies by company and is included in the JSON stats file. A median band is not the same as a “typical offer”: JDs often cover a wide seniority span and US state differentials.
Remote-work reality check
Every row below uses two independent signals. The ATS flag is the boolean sent by the source ATS (Greenhouse, Ashby, or Lever); the text signal is whether the title, location, or description contains explicit remote-work language. At several employers the two signals diverge by more than 50 percentage points, suggesting the ATS flag is set by defaults rather than per-role policy. For reporting purposes this means neither signal alone is reliable, and we publish both.
| Company | Jobs | ATS flag remote | Text remote | Hybrid in text |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe | 495 | 15% | 19% | 2.4% |
| DoorDash | 453 | 11% | 99% | 15% |
| Datadog | 428 | 12% | 15% | 94% |
| Anthropic | 427 | 7.3% | 9.4% | 100% |
| Airbnb | 236 | 20% | 51% | 4.7% |
| Spotify | 176 | 0.0% | 78% | 1.1% |
| Scale AI | 171 | 0.0% | 11% | 8.8% |
| Notion | 155 | 63% | 2.6% | 1.3% |
| Figma | 154 | 0.0% | 100% | 18% |
| Coinbase | 147 | 93% | 100% | 7.5% |
| 142 | 58% | 62% | 43% | |
| Instacart | 133 | 92% | 93% | 2.3% |
| Ramp | 130 | 98% | 4.6% | 1.5% |
| Plaid | 98 | 1.0% | 4.1% | 4.1% |
| Discord | 79 | 22% | 22% | 3.8% |
| Vercel | 78 | 30% | 97% | 71% |
Largest ATS-vs-text divergence
- Figma: ATS flag 0.0%, text signal 100% (gap of 100 points across 154 roles).
- Ramp: ATS flag 98%, text signal 4.6% (gap of 93 points across 130 roles).
- DoorDash: ATS flag 11%, text signal 99% (gap of 88 points across 453 roles).
How to cite this report
Research output, dataset, and methodology are released under CC BY 4.0. Attribution required.
Companies in the 2026 Q2 index
Airbnb, Anthropic, Coinbase, Datadog, Discord, DoorDash, Figma, Instacart, Notion, Pinterest, Plaid, Ramp, Scale AI, Spotify, Stripe, Vercel. The index is curated for signal density (AI-native or high-growth technology employers with public ATS feeds). It is not a representative sample of the broader US labor market. Quarterly updates may add or remove companies based on ATS availability; the complete list per quarter is always published in the stats JSON.
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