Where Are AI Jobs Concentrated in 2026? A City-by-City Breakdown
Forget remote for a moment. Of the 1,789 AI/ML roles currently tracked by HireIndex — across 748 companies, as of May 18, 2026 — roughly 67% list as remote or unspecified. The remaining third is where geography actually matters. And that distribution is more surprising than most candidates expect.
London is the largest non-remote AI hiring market right now. Not San Francisco. Not New York.
Which city has the most AI jobs in 2026?
Here’s the current ranking by open role count, excluding remote-only listings:
| City | Open AI/ML Roles |
|---|---|
| London | 173 |
| San Francisco | 129 |
| New York | 127 |
| Toronto | 81 |
| Sydney | 77 |
| Seattle | 40 |
| Paris | 28 |
London’s 173 roles are spread across a real ecosystem: Spotify (11 roles), Writer (8), JPMorganChase (5), Cohere (3), plus a long tail of financial services and consulting firms. It’s not a single company driving the number — it’s structural demand across verticals.
San Francisco is a different story. OpenAI accounts for 65 of the city’s 129 open roles — just over 50%. Strip OpenAI out, and SF’s AI job market looks roughly equivalent to Toronto. That concentration is a risk for candidates who want multiple paths in, not a single funnel.
New York sits at 127 roles and tells a third story: financial services meets AI at scale. Capital One alone has 47 open AI/ML positions in New York — the largest employer by city in the entire dataset. Spotify adds another 26. The city’s AI hiring is less about foundation models and more about applied AI at institutions that move deliberately, pay well, and skew heavily toward senior candidates.
Which cities are most senior — and which are most accessible for early-career candidates?
Seniority concentration varies sharply by market, and most job seekers don’t account for it when they target a city.
| City | Senior+ Share |
|---|---|
| New York | 47% |
| Toronto | 43% |
| Sydney | 38% |
| London | 36% |
| San Francisco | 24% |
New York’s 47% senior+ concentration is the highest of any major AI hiring market. If you’re mid-career or above, it’s arguably the best geography to be targeting right now. Financial services companies — Capital One, JPMorganChase, and similar — are hiring AI engineers specifically to work on systems at institutional scale. They want people who can navigate complexity, not just train models.
San Francisco tells the opposite story. Only 24% of its 129 roles are senior-level — the lowest of any major city. OpenAI’s aggressive hiring across mid-level engineering roles pulls this number down significantly. If you’re early-career and targeting Machine Learning Engineer or AI Research roles, SF is where the entry-level volume actually exists.
Toronto and Sydney are worth attention. Toronto’s 81 roles mix AI startup hiring (Waabi with 7 roles, Cohere with 2) with serious financial services demand (KPMG, BMO, Tangerine Bank) — a more balanced market than it typically gets credit for. Sydney’s 77 roles skew heavily toward banking: Westpac (10 roles across two entities) and Commonwealth Bank of Australia are the primary drivers. Applied AI inside large institutions, not frontier model work.
What is driving London’s lead?
Three factors: geography, regulatory pressure, and incumbent financial services firms building AI teams from scratch.
The UK doesn’t have the same concentration of frontier AI labs as the Bay Area, but it has something different — a dense cluster of multinational companies, trading firms, and banks wiring AI into existing systems at scale. That produces sustained mid-level engineering demand that is less cyclical than the startup hiring visible in SF.
European regulatory pressure (the EU AI Act creates compliance obligations for UK-adjacent firms) is also generating roles that don’t exist in the same form in the US: applied research focused on explainability, AI governance, and fairness auditing. These show up in the Data Scientist and AI Research counts rather than the headline “AI Engineer” bucket, but they are real, funded positions.
Writer hiring 8 roles in London and Spotify running 11 AI positions from their London office signal something beyond financial services — product companies are treating London as a legitimate AI engineering hub, not just a European satellite office.
What do Paris and Seattle reveal?
Paris is an extreme case: all 28 of its indexed AI/ML roles come from a single company — Mistral AI. If you want to work in Paris on AI, you are essentially evaluating one employer. That is a legitimate option — Mistral is one of the most significant AI labs in Europe — but it is not a diversified market.
Seattle shows a similar dynamic. Amazon accounts for 27 of the city’s 40 open AI/ML roles (across Amazon, Amazon.com Services LLC, and Amazon Web Services). Seattle without Amazon is a thin market. With it, you are essentially making a single employer decision.
The lesson: city rankings can be misleading when one employer dominates. Look at who the actual employers are, not just the city headcount.
Where to focus based on what you want
Early career, high volume, startup culture → San Francisco. OpenAI’s mid-level hiring pace alone creates more ML and engineering seats than most other cities combined. Competition is real, but so is the volume.
Senior, applied AI, financial services → New York. Capital One and JPMorganChase are paying for experience and shipping at scale. The seniority concentration means less competition from candidates who are applying to the wrong market.
Broad market, Europe, financial services → London. The most diversified non-remote AI hiring market in the current dataset, with both startup and enterprise employers active simultaneously.
Autonomous vehicles and enterprise LLM → Toronto. Waabi (self-driving), Cohere (enterprise LLM), and the country’s major banks are all actively hiring — a mix that holds up when one segment slows.
Applied AI inside banks, APAC → Sydney. Less startup density, but the banking sector demand is consistent and growing.
The full current dataset is browsable by skill and city. Start with Machine Learning Engineer or LLM Engineer roles if you are targeting specific titles, or browse Remote if location flexibility is the priority. Data updated every Monday from direct ATS sources.
HireIndex tracks 1,789 open AI/ML roles across 748 companies as of May 18, 2026.