Key findings
- 1
On 18 Oct 2026, 16 of the 25 AI labs whose boards were read had human-data roles open: 101 roles, 2.9% of their 3,503 open roles.
- 2
xAI had the most (24 of its 304 open roles), in Evaluations, AI tutors and raters and Human-data operations.
- 3
AI tutors and raters is the most common kind of human-data role (25 roles at 4 labs).
- 4
7 roles buy or license data (data partnerships and acquisition), at Mistral AI, OpenAI and Thinking Machines Lab.
- 5
29 of the staff roles state a yearly salary range; the middle of the median range is $318K, and ranges run from $155K to $850K.
- 6
22 contract roles state an hourly rate, from $18 to $100 an hour.
Figure 1
Human-data roles open at each lab
Which AI labs are hiring for the teams that buy, run and evaluate human data?
Sample. Every role open on the public job boards of 25 AI labs on 18 Oct 2026 (3,503 roles); labs whose board could not be read today are listed in the coverage figure.
A role counts when its title (or, for a lab's own human-data team, its team name) matches the published patterns; research roles that only use data are not counted.
A lab's name and its count of all open roles open its own job board. A board cannot be filtered to human-data roles, so a lab's human-data count opens its rows in the figure of every human-data role below, each linked to its posting.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, Which AI Labs Are Hiring for Human Data, read 18 Oct 2026.
Figure 2
What kind of human-data roles labs are hiring
Are labs hiring people to run human data, to buy it, to evaluate models, or to build RL environments?
| Team | Open roles | Labs hiring |
|---|---|---|
| AI tutors and raters | 25 | 4 |
| Evaluations | 21 | 11 |
| Human-data operations | 20 | 8 |
| Robot data collection | 14 | 4 |
| RL environments | 8 | 6 |
| Data partnerships and acquisition | 7 | 3 |
| Training-data research | 6 | 5 |
Sample. The 101 human-data roles open on 18 Oct 2026, each counted once, at the first team type its title matches.
Robot data collection: data-collection and robot operators, teleoperators, robot pilots, data creators.
AI tutors and raters: AI tutors, raters, annotators, annotation and data-quality specialists, data associates.
Data partnerships and acquisition: data partnerships, acquisition, licensing, sourcing and deals.
Human-data operations: human data, data operations, annotation, data labelling or collection, human feedback, RLHF, expert data, data programs and services.
RL environments: RL and agentic environments, environment engineering, RL gyms.
Evaluations: evals, evaluations, benchmarks, assessments.
Training-data research: post-training and RL data, training data, data quality, data strategy, data flywheels.
Data centres, web crawling and pre-training ingestion, data science and engineering, recruiting, manufacturing quality and privacy roles are never counted, and research that only learns from human data is not human-data work.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, Which AI Labs Are Hiring for Human Data, read 18 Oct 2026.
Figure 3
Every human-data role open at the labs today
Which roles exactly, where, and at what stated salary?
Sample. The 101 roles, each linked to its posting on the lab's own board, read on 18 Oct 2026.
A stated salary is the base range the posting publishes (US pay-transparency ranges in most cases); n/a where none is stated.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, Which AI Labs Are Hiring for Human Data, read 18 Oct 2026.
Figure 4
Which labs' boards were read
Whose hiring does this report see?
Sample. 25 labs with a public job-board API, read on 18 Oct 2026. Labs that publish no board API (Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple among them) cannot be counted.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, Which AI Labs Are Hiring for Human Data, read 18 Oct 2026.
For labs, data vendors and researchers
Buy the data behind this report
The figures above are a summary. Behind them are records we collect ourselves, every day:
9,572 roles tracked, each with its history
Every role on 29 job boards, read daily since 13 Jul 2026: its pay and place, and the first and last day it was open.
6,200 apply clicks in 28 days
Which roles people actually apply to, by field, pay and kind of work. It happens on this site, so nobody else can count it.
39 lab and vendor hiring boards
The job boards of 25 AI labs and 14 human-data vendors, read every day: who is hiring for human data, and who is hiring to buy it.
What you can buy
The records
The rows behind any figure, with their history, not only the totals.
A regular feed
The same figures every week or month, as files.
A custom cut or benchmark
Your countries, languages or fields, or your own platform against the market.
Method and definitions
The public job boards (Greenhouse and Ashby APIs) of AI labs and human-data vendors, read every day. Every figure is computed by one database query over the window shown, the same query for the live report and for every edition. Each figure states its sample beneath it.
- Human-data role
- A role whose title (or, for a lab's own human-data team, its team) matches the published patterns for human-data operations, data partnerships and acquisition, evaluations, RL environments, training-data research, robot data collection or AI tutors and raters.
- Stated salary
- The pay range the posting publishes (a yearly base range for staff roles, an hourly rate for contract roles).
- Window
- A reading of every board today; the report has no monthly editions because past boards cannot be read again. Download the data to keep a copy.
What this data cannot tell you
- Labs without a public board API (Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Google DeepMind's own careers site) cannot be read, so their hiring is not counted.
- An open role is hiring intent, not headcount: some companies keep one evergreen posting per team, others post one per location.
- A role counts by its title and team against published patterns; a role described only in its text is not counted.
How the job feeds are read and roles are classified: site methodology. How fresh, complete and consistent the data is, checked every day: data quality and coverage.
Editions
This report reads the live job boards every day. Past boards cannot be read again, so it has no monthly editions: download the data to keep a dated copy.
- Live dataToday's boards, read daily
Cite and reuse
Free to quote, chart and republish under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. Live figures change daily: cite a monthly edition for numbers that will read the same later, or keep the access date.
Citation
AITraining.jobs (2026). Which AI Labs Are Hiring for Human Data (live data, 18 Oct 2026 to 18 Oct 2026). https://aitraining.run/research/ai-labs-human-data-hiring (accessed 18 Oct 2026)
BibTeX
@misc{aitrainingjobs_ai_labs_human_data_hiring_live,
author = {{AITraining.jobs}},
title = {Which AI Labs Are Hiring for Human Data (live data, 18 Oct 2026 to 18 Oct 2026)},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://aitraining.run/research/ai-labs-human-data-hiring}},
note = {Accessed 18 Oct 2026},
}More research
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