LLM Engineer Jobs in 2026: Capital One Has More Than Any AI Lab
The title sounds like a frontier AI job. The actual hiring data tells a different story.
Of the 1,789 open AI/ML roles indexed by HireIndex as of May 18, 2026, only 37 are explicitly tagged as LLM Engineer roles — 2% of the total market. But if you’re targeting this title specifically, the company dominating the category is not the one most candidates are applying to.
Capital One has 13 open LLM Engineer positions — more than any AI lab in the index.
How many LLM Engineer jobs are available right now?
37 is a thin slice of the overall AI market. For comparison, Machine Learning Engineer accounts for 363 indexed roles — roughly 10x the volume. Data Scientist adds another 287. LLM Engineer, as an explicit title, is a narrow category.
But that number undersells the actual demand. LLM-related work is distributed across adjacent title categories: Applied AI (157 roles), AI Research (107 roles), and AI Software Engineer (117 roles) all contain roles where large language model work is central. The 37 “LLM Engineer” titles represent only jobs where the employer chose that exact label.
What those 37 roles signal clearly: the title has moved from niche buzzword to standard enterprise job description. And the enterprise hiring it most aggressively is a bank, not a lab.
Which companies are actually posting LLM Engineer roles?
Here’s the full employer breakdown for the 37 explicitly-tagged LLM Engineer roles currently in the index:
| Company | Open LLM Engineer Roles |
|---|---|
| Capital One | 13 |
| Scale AI | 2 |
| JPMorganChase | 2 |
| Bright Vision Technologies | 2 |
| Turing | 2 |
| Databricks | 1 |
| Pika | 1 |
| Deloitte | 1 |
| Outlier AI | 1 |
| Others (single roles) | 12 |
Capital One’s 13 roles are 35% of the entire category. Strip them out and you have a thin tail of staffing agencies, consulting firms, and specialized vendors — with one AI data platform (Databricks), one evaluation-focused company (Scale AI), and a handful of others.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Mistral — the organizations candidates most associate with LLM work — contribute zero explicitly-titled LLM Engineer roles to the current index. That doesn’t mean they don’t do this work. It means they title it differently: Applied Research, Research Engineer, AI Foundations. Candidates searching “LLM Engineer” specifically won’t surface those roles.
Where are LLM Engineer jobs located?
| Location | Open Roles |
|---|---|
| Remote | 16 |
| New York | 12 |
| London | 7 |
| Toronto | 1 |
| Sydney | 1 |
Remote leads narrowly. But for in-person LLM Engineer roles, New York is the market — driven almost entirely by Capital One (12 of its 13 roles are New York-based) and JPMorganChase.
London’s 7 roles follow the same pattern: JPMorganChase’s LLM Suite Engineering team, plus a cluster of UK consulting and contract firms placing engineers into financial services. Enterprise demand, not startup culture.
San Francisco has zero explicitly-tagged LLM Engineer roles in the current index. The city with the densest concentration of AI talent and frontier model companies is not where employers are using this job title.
What does LLM Engineer work actually involve?
Capital One’s open titles are the clearest window into what this role means in practice:
- Applied Researcher I (AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI)
- Senior Lead AI Engineer (LLM Customization and Finetuning)
- Sr. Manager, Engineering — AI Gateway (LLM Inference)
- Senior Manager, Data Science — LLM Customization Team
- Lead AI Engineer (FM Hosting, LLM Inference)
The pattern is consistent: customization, finetuning, inference infrastructure, evaluation, and agentic workflows. This is not building foundation models from scratch. It’s the engineering discipline of making large language models work reliably inside real products at scale — fraud detection, customer service, risk operations, internal tooling.
Databricks’ single LLM Engineer role is titled “AI Gateway (LLM Inference)” — the same infrastructure framing. Scale AI’s two LLM Engineer roles focus on evaluation: “Staff Machine Learning Research Scientist, LLM Evals” and “Tech Lead/Manager, Machine Learning Research Scientist — LLM Evals.” The theme across companies is operational and applied, not foundational research.
Is LLM Engineering accessible to early-career candidates?
No. Of the 37 LLM Engineer roles in the current index, zero are classified as junior-level. The split is 23 mid-level, 12 senior, and 2 senior-heavy. The senior+ share is 38%.
This makes LLM Engineer one of the more experience-weighted categories in the index. For comparison: AI Research roles are 5% junior. Machine Learning Engineer roles are 2% junior. LLM Engineer sits at 0%.
The reasoning is embedded in the work itself. Finetuning foundation models, building inference pipelines, and shipping evaluation frameworks all require grounding in transformer architectures, training dynamics, and production ML systems. These aren’t skills you develop from day one — they’re built through adjacent roles first.
If you’re targeting LLM Engineering and don’t yet have production ML experience, the practical path is through Machine Learning Engineer roles first. At 363 indexed openings, there’s far more entry surface in that category, and it builds the foundational skills LLM Engineer roles assume.
What this means for your job search
Target the real employers. For an explicit LLM Engineer title, Capital One is running the largest hiring program in the country right now. JPMorganChase is #2. This changes how you position: production reliability, finetuning on domain-specific data, and inference optimization matter more than research novelty.
New York, not San Francisco. If you want in-person LLM Engineer work, the market is in New York. London is second. San Francisco, despite concentrating most frontier AI talent, is not where employers are using this specific title.
Don’t filter by title alone. The 37 explicit LLM Engineer roles are the narrow end of a much larger market. Applied AI, AI Research, and AI Software Engineer listings all contain LLM-heavy roles. Searching only for “LLM Engineer” cuts out the majority of relevant openings — including most of what OpenAI, Anthropic, and similar labs are actually hiring for.
Check the source. 78% of LLM Engineer roles in the index surface through Adzuna rather than direct ATS feeds — which means they’re harder to find via the standard Greenhouse/Lever job board search. Aggregator coverage matters more for this title than for most others.
Browse current LLM Engineer roles, compare with Machine Learning Engineer volume, or filter by New York for in-person options. Data updated every Monday from direct ATS and aggregator sources.
HireIndex tracks 1,789 open AI/ML roles across 748 companies as of May 18, 2026.