Understanding trends in our AI job postings

This week, let’s review key trends in the jobs we’ve found that may help mitigate AI risk, including:

• Growth in the number of postings in the field
• The types of organisations that are hiring
• The most in-demand skills
• The experience level required for these roles

We’ve ranked catastrophic risks from AI as the world’s most pressing problem since 2016, but it’s only in the last few years that the topic has really hit the mainstream.

As AI has advanced rapidly and the risks have become more salient, we’ve seen many more jobs available to help mitigate the dangers.

The number of AI-related jobs we posted on our job board rose throughout 2023 and then plateaued in 2024. But in January 2025, we posted the most AI-relevant jobs yet!

In 2023, we posted an average of 63 AI-related roles per month. In 2024, the average rose to 105 — a 67% increase.

Over this time, nonprofit jobs have been the most common, though they were briefly overtaken by both company and government jobs in early 2024.

This trend could reflect our vantage point. As a nonprofit that works closely with other nonprofits, we may be best positioned to find and assess high-impact roles in this sector while potentially missing other great roles in sectors more opaque to us.

That said, one reason we’ve prioritised AI risk reduction is the potential failure of market and political mechanisms to produce a proportionate response to the challenge. So it’s not that surprising that nonprofits might be more likely to offer great opportunities for this work.

If you are looking for work in this field, you may want to know what skills employers look for.

Here are the trends in the AI-related roles we’ve posted in the last two years, broken down by the popular skills we tagged them with.

This shows that:

• Research continues to be the most in-demand skill, as AI safety is fundamentally an area of research.
• Demand for policy-relevant skills increased after mid-2023 and remained high in 2024, coinciding with our updated career path rankings, which placed AI governance and policy in the top slot.
• Roles requiring outreach skills, which could also be categorised as communications skills, trail the pack. That’s not too surprising, but we think there may be more opportunities here in the future. Many people working on AI risk think that people with strong communication skills and AI knowledge could be highly valuable. If that’s you, consider applying for our 1-1 advising so we can guide you to potentially high-impact opportunities.

If you want to build skills to work on AI but aren’t sure how, check out our guides to building key skills, which includes:

• Research
• Programming
• Policy
• Information security
• Outreach / communication
• Operations and organisation-building

Next, let’s look at the breakdown of AI-related roles by experience level.

Opportunities for junior (1–4 years) and mid-career (5–9 years) professionals dominate the pack and have grown the most as the total number of jobs increased. We find fewer jobs aimed at senior and entry-level folks, though there have been somewhat more senior-level jobs posted in 2024 than in the first half of 2023.

However, these numbers may understate the level of demand for senior-level hires. We frequently hear from employers in our network that they would love to hire people with many years or decades of professional experience. But these types of roles may not often be publicly advertised and so wouldn’t appear on our job board.

If you have many years of experience and are looking for these kinds of roles, we’d encourage you to apply for our 1-1 advising.

The lack of entry-level positions may feel discouraging to some, but it just means that you’ll likely need to build career capital before aiming for most of the roles that appear on our job board. Our career guide is the best place to start if you’re at that stage.

Here are some other interesting trends:

• We’ve seen fewer safety-relevant job postings at OpenAI over the last year, and more safety-relevant jobs at Google DeepMind.
• In February, as the Trump administration began to look for roles to cut in the federal government, we saw an increase in people searching for roles on our job board in D.C.

Some caveats on this data:

• Our goal is to only list roles that can contribute to a career aimed at reducing the largest risks from AI, so this certainly isn’t a comprehensive overview of all AI jobs.
  The judgements about which roles to include and how to categorise them are difficult and complex, and we’re surely mistaken about them in some ways — and that likely affects the trends above!
• We’ve also gotten better at adding more jobs over the years, which may influence some of the observed trends.

Learn more:

• Our career review of AI governance and policy
• Our career review of AI safety technical research
• Our job board FAQ