Job listings on LinkedIn for roles like "growth engineer," "go-to-market engineer," "solutions architect" and "operations engineer" grew by 54 per cent between 2023 and 2025, with over 400,000 new roles posted. The Big Four accounting firms in English-speaking countries posted more job adverts for AI specialists than for auditors last year. However, the engineering or AI relevance in some of these postings can be thin upon closer inspection.

"There's definitely some title inflation," says Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn's head of economics for the Americas. Many new engineering-related roles involve software engineering elements, but employers and employees lean into technical language because "anything technical carries more weight," even if the underlying job hasn't fully changed.

Jobs site Indeed finds that "AI" now appears more commonly in job titles outside tech than within it. In the US, 63 per cent of jobs with "AI" in the title sit outside the technology sector. Nearly 74 per cent of job postings mentioned AI last year, but around one quarter provided little context for how AI would be used, according to Indeed's analysis. These "shallow mentions" often amount to "name-dropping."

Kabir Bali, co-founder of recruitment platform Jumpstart, notes that anxieties about commercial relevance drive this trend: "Every start-up now has 'AI native' on their job descriptions." While this language may make roles seem more desirable, it can also narrow the applicant pool.