Andela finds Fortune 500 AI job titles masking hybrid roles

Fortune 500 companies are advertising for engineers who build applications on foundation models without naming that role: 6,758 technical job postings contained the skills Andela classifies as LLM Application Engineer, according to the talent and services company’s Sept. 10 research announcement.

The mismatch also runs inside familiar AI titles. Among roughly 1,832 postings with titles such as AI Engineer and ML Engineer, 53% required skills drawn from at least two established roles under Andela’s classification, including LLM orchestration, autonomous agents and vector databases. The company also identified data scientist postings asking candidates to ship LLM agents.

Andela’s Emerging Skills Research analyzed 47,101 technical postings from Fortune 500 companies and scored 2,026 distinct skills. The findings rely on Andela’s proprietary skills taxonomy, which assigns skills to established roles and tracks combinations that recur across those boundaries. The method uses a single snapshot of job data rather than measuring posting volumes over time.

Across the sample, researchers identified 23 recurring skill bundles that did not map to standardized job titles. Andela classified eight as new roles and 14 as hybrids of old and new; it discarded one for accuracy. These are the company’s classifications of the work described in postings, rather than a count of newly created positions.

Andela defines an LLM Application Engineer as someone who builds on foundation models rather than training them. Its MLOps Pipeline Engineer combines skills from five established roles. Other emerging profiles it identified include FinOps Reliability Engineer, Docs-as-Code Engineer and Lakehouse Analytics Engineer.