Is AI engineer the new software engineer? What 47,000 engineering job ads say

Not yet. On companies' own careers pages, 14.9% of engineering job ads, about one in seven, have an AI or machine learning title. That's three times as many as backend, and more than backend, full-stack and frontend together. A plain "software engineer" title is still on 53.9% of them, though, more than half.

A question I keep seeing from engineers is whether "software engineer" is on its way out, and whether they should start calling themselves AI engineers. Job ads are where companies say what they're hiring for, so we counted the titles of almost 47,000 engineering ads, all real, live job ads open in late September 2026.

One engineering job ad in seven is AI or machine learning

AI engineer and machine learning engineer jobs together make up 7,007 of the 46,990 ads. Backend has 2,345, so AI and ML is three times its size. Put backend, full-stack and frontend together and they come to 5,472, or 11.6%, still fewer than the AI and ML titles alone.

Data: 321,313 open job ads on 16,820 companies' own careers boards, on hiring systems like Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, BambooHR, Teamtailor, Workday, Personio, Workable and Lever, read on 23 and 24 September 2026. The boards lean toward tech companies and employers that hire internationally. 46,990 of the ads are for engineering, meaning a title that names engineer, developer or programmer for software work. Managers, directors, recruiters and interns are left out, and so are sales, solutions, mechanical, electrical, field, hardware and similar engineering. A title counts as AI & ML when it names AI, ML, machine learning, LLMs, generative AI, deep learning, MLOps, NLP, computer vision or agentic work, so "Software Engineer, AI Platform" counts as AI.

Software engineer jobs are still more than half

On AI engineer vs software engineer, the plain title wins by a wide margin. 25,340 ads, or 53.9%, ask for a software engineer and name no specialty at all. That's more than three and a half times the AI and ML ads.

A title is only what a company chooses to call the job, so some of those plain software engineer ads may well be for teams building with AI. The 14.9% counts the jobs named for AI, which is the part you'd find by searching for it.

Europe leans further into AI titles than the US

In Europe, close to one engineering ad in five has an AI or ML title. In the United States it's about one in eight, and the plain software engineer title covers 62.4% of the ads, against 44.2% in Europe. European ads name a specialty more often in general, backend and frontend included. The ads don't say why, so I won't guess.

Data: the same engineering ads, 9,006 of them located in Europe and 17,896 in the United States.

Where in Europe the AI engineer jobs are

London has by far the most engineering ads, and almost one in five of them is AI or ML. Paris is a little higher at 20.3%. The highest shares are in smaller markets, Zurich at 26.4% and Madrid at 24.7%, but those rest on 121 and 150 ads, so a few employers can move them. Warsaw and Dublin are the lowest on the list, at 10.1% and 11.8%.

Stockholm sits in the middle at 14.0%. If you're looking there and don't speak Swedish, most tech ads are written in English anyway. We counted that in tech jobs in Sweden without Swedish.

Data: the same engineering ads, in the European cities with 100 or more of them.

Is it growing? Too early to say

The obvious next question is whether this share is rising. Sorting the open ads by the month each was published, the AI and ML share moves between 11.6% and 18.5% with no clear direction. It was 15.2% for ads published in July 2025 and 14.4% for those published in September 2026.

That can't show a rise or a fall, though. Ads usually close once the job is filled, and the ones that closed are gone from the boards, so the older months hold only the few ads still open. Comparing months only works with ads counted as they appear. I'll come back to this with the ads posted from here on.

Data: the open engineering ads by the month each was published, July 2025 to September 2026. Ads that closed before 23 September 2026 aren't in it.

What this means for an AI job search

• Search for both titles. Most engineering ads still say software engineer, and some of those are AI work. Searching only for "AI engineer" misses them.
• Read what comes after the comma. "Software Engineer, AI Platform" is an AI job with a general title, and it's common.
• Search "machine learning engineer jobs" separately. Companies use AI and ML for similar roles, and a keyword search only finds the words you type.
• Expect look-alikes. A search with AI in it also turns up jobs that only share the words, like selling an AI product or training one. Reading every ad to find out takes hours, as I measured in how much time a job search takes.
• In Europe, look at London and Paris first for volume, and at Zurich, Madrid and Cambridge for the highest share.