The new job titles of the AI era: AI engineer, GTM engineer, Head of AI, forward-deployed engineer
Part of a 14-post series on IT jobs in the AI era. Start with the overview: IT job market 2022 to 2026: openings fell, jobs held.
In the six months to October 2024, UK job boards carried 20 adverts for a Head of AI. In the same six months of 2026 they carried 151, more than ten for every CIO advert, at a median advertised salary of £100,000, the same as a CTO [ITJobsWatch, 2026]. Head of AI is one of four titles that barely existed when ChatGPT launched and are now normal on job boards. The others are AI engineer, forward-deployed engineer and GTM engineer. I counted when each one first appeared and how fast it spread in Hacker News hiring posts and on company job pages. Two titles you might expect, prompt engineer and anything "AI-native", barely made it into job ads.
When each title first appeared in Hacker News hiring posts, with dated outside events. Source:, SD-7, chapter sources.
AI engineer overtook ML engineer
In the first line of Hacker News "Who is hiring" posts, where companies list the roles they are hiring for, "AI engineer" appeared in 0.7 of every 1,000 posts in late 2022. By January-October 2026 it was 30.7 per 1,000. The older title, ML engineer, peaked in 2024 at 25.8 per 1,000 and fell to 16.0. AI engineer overtook it in 2025 [Hacker News "Who is hiring", 2022-2026]. Counting mentions anywhere in the post text gives the same picture: 0.2% of all hiring posts in 2022, 5.6% in 2026 [SD-7, 2026].
HN hiring posts naming each title in their title line, per 1,000 posts. Source.
Company job pages show the same jump. Across 9,720 job pages on Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby boards from October 2022 to March 2023, four carried an AI engineer title. Across 42,994 pages from May to October 2026, 223 did, at 119 companies, led by OpenAI (23) and Anthropic (11). Per 10,000 pages, that is 4.1 rising to 51.9, about thirteen times as common [company job pages, 2022-2026]. LinkedIn's January 2026 Jobs on the Rise lists put AI engineer first in the US, and first in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK [LinkedIn, 2026].
In Europe, Indeed found 288 distinct job titles touched by AI in Germany in the first quarter of 2026, 4.2% of all titles and the most in Europe, ahead of the UK (160), France (138) and the Netherlands (84). The US had 822, or 8.3% of titles [Indeed Hiring Lab, 2026]. More than half of those European AI-touched titles sit outside tech occupations: 59% in Germany, 54% in the UK and France. My reading is that "AI engineer" is a software engineer whose product includes a model. The ai-era-it-jobs report expects it to merge back into "software engineer" by 2029, at medium confidence [ai-era-it-jobs report, section 13, 2026].
The forward-deployed engineer left Palantir
In our 2022-23 job pages there were seven forward-deployed engineer titles, and every one was at Palantir. By 2026 there were 229 at 83 companies: Databricks posted 34, OpenAI 21 and Palantir 14 [company job pages, 2022-2026]. In Hacker News title lines the role first appears in February 2024 and reached 11.9 per 1,000 posts in 2026. An outside count of postings with the title found them up 1,165% in January-October 2025 over the same months of 2024, with a median posted salary of $173,816 and travel required in 68% of ads [Bloomberry, 2025]. Europe is a minority of the demand: of the 229 pages in 2026, 28 were in the UK, eight in Germany and five in France.
The FDE is an engineer who sits with the customer and makes the product work in their environment. In infrastructure sales we called a close cousin the systems engineer. What is new is commit rights: the FDE writes production code against the vendor's own product. My guess is that AI vendors hire them because most customers cannot yet put a model into production on their own.
New titles per 10,000 company job pages, before ChatGPT and in 2026. Source.
Head of AI and the GTM engineer: titles from the business side
The UK Head of AI count went 20, 27, 151 over the six months to October in 2024, 2025 and 2026. The advertised median went £82,500, £108,500, £100,000 [ITJobsWatch, 2026]. The title often comes before the formal one: in a Gartner poll of June 2024, 54% of organisations had a head of AI, and 88% of those did not carry the Chief AI Officer title [Gartner via IT Brief, 2024]. The US public sector made it formal in March 2024, when federal agencies were told to appoint a Chief AI Officer [US OMB, 2024]. On company job pages the title is still rare: nine pages in 2026, none in 2022-23.
The GTM engineer was invented by a vendor. Clay named the role internally in August 2023 [Growth Curve, undated]. The job is building the enrichment and outreach workflows that used to be an SDR's list work [Growth Unhinged, 2026]. Hacker News saw the first GTM engineer title line in March 2025: Count, a UK company, hiring remotely across the UK and Europe at £95,000. By September 2025 Sumble counted 45 GTM engineer postings in a month [Growth Unhinged, 2025]. Our 2026 job pages hold 26, at companies such as SentinelOne, 1Password and Snowflake, and none in 2022-23. In the European seed corpus I collected this autumn, 76 sales and marketing titles were GTM, growth or marketing engineers: 22 in Germany, 14 in the UK, 9 in Poland and 7 in the Netherlands [seed corpus, 2026]. Pay looks very different by region, but on a thin sample: a practitioner survey puts the median base at $135,000 in the US and $75,000 in Europe, the European figure on 19 responses [State of GTME, 2026].
The titles that did not happen, and why the new ones are hard to file
Prompt engineer is the clearest case. It appears in none of the 16,203 Hacker News title lines from October 2022 to October 2026 and on 2 of 42,994 company job pages in 2026 [company job pages, 2026]. "AI-native" in a title is not the same signal either. It is on 35 job pages in 2026, but many of those are sales roles named after the customer segment ("Enterprise Account Executive (AI Native & Emerging Tech)"). Newer still is the AI agent engineer, first seen in a StrongDM post in June 2025 and on 22 job pages in 2026, eight of them at Scale AI.
Taken together, the share of Hacker News posts naming any AI role in their title line went from 2.3% in late 2022 to 6.5% in both 2025 and 2026 [Hacker News "Who is hiring", 2022-2026]. That is real growth, but most hiring is still for titles that existed in 2022.
Each new title sits on a border between two old jobs: software and model (AI engineer), engineer and customer (FDE), operations and sales (GTM engineer), technology and the board (Head of AI). That is also why they are hard to file. The role map this project started with left 39 bare "GTM Engineer" titles unclassified, because it was written on the old borders [ai-era-it-jobs report, section 5, 2026].
What this means if you are thinking about a new title
- Pick the border you already stand on. A backend developer is one step from AI engineer; a solutions or systems engineer is one step from FDE; a marketing-ops or RevOps person is one step from GTM engineer. These titles have spread well beyond the start-ups that coined them, so the step leads to a real job.
- Skip the adjective and show the work. "Prompt engineer" and "AI-native" barely exist as titles. An integration you shipped, an enrichment workflow that fed a pipeline, or a model you put in front of customers is what these ads ask for.
- In Europe, look at Germany and the UK first. They hold the most AI-touched titles on Indeed, and the UK pays a Head of AI like a CTO. For GTM engineering, check whether the employer pays European or US rates before you accept the title.