New York AI Jobs in 2026: 74 Open Roles and the Employer Mix Nobody Expects
The conventional picture of New York’s AI job market runs something like this: banks and hedge funds running ML models on trading signals, with a thin layer of media companies on top. The data from HireIndex’s August 3, 2026 index — 1,623 open AI/ML roles across 765 companies — tells a different story.
New York has 74 open AI/ML roles, putting it 4th globally among non-remote markets. Capital One is the dominant employer with 17 roles, Spotify has 11, and OpenAI has 6 — all of which are enterprise deployment positions, with no research headcount at all. Two insurance companies account for 9 roles between them. The traditional banks (J.P. Morgan, JPMorganChase, Citibank) contribute a combined 3 roles.
How many AI jobs are open in New York right now?
74, in HireIndex’s most recent index. The global city ranking for non-remote positions:
| City | Open AI/ML Roles |
|---|---|
| London | 212 |
| San Francisco | 143 |
| Toronto | 90 |
| New York | 74 |
| Sydney | 41 |
| Seattle | 12 |
| Berlin | 9 |
New York’s position at #4 reflects a market that is genuinely large but structured differently from the cities above it. London’s 212 roles span financial services, consumer tech, and AI-native startups across multiple verticals. San Francisco is dominated by frontier labs. New York’s 74 roles run heavily through two sectors that don’t usually get covered as AI hiring markets: a technology-first bank building AI platform infrastructure, and a streaming company treating New York as a full engineering hub.
Which companies are hiring AI talent in New York?
| Company | Open AI/ML Roles in NYC |
|---|---|
| Capital One | 17 |
| Spotify | 11 |
| New York Life Insurance | 7 |
| OpenAI | 6 |
| Writer | 5 |
| Amazon | 3 |
| MassMutual | 2 |
The six companies below MassMutual each have one role in New York: Harvey, JPMorganChase, J.P. Morgan, Citibank, BlackRock, Faire, Genentech, Perplexity, and a handful of smaller firms.
Capital One’s 17 New York roles account for 23% of the entire local market — the same concentration ratio that Commonwealth Bank of Australia holds in Sydney (22%). But the work is completely different. CBA’s Sydney AI hiring is almost entirely focused on financial crime detection and fraud modeling. Capital One’s New York AI hiring is platform engineering: GenAI Platform Services, Foundation Model Hosting, LLM Customization and Fine-tuning, Agentic AI infrastructure, and MLX (their internal ML acceleration platform). These are mid-to-senior engineers building the internal tooling that Capital One’s other AI teams run on.
What is Capital One actually building in New York?
The job titles make the scope concrete:
Senior Lead AI Engineer (GenAI Platform, Agentic Infrastructure), Senior Lead AI Engineer (LLM Gateway, FM Hosting), Lead AI Engineer (FM Hosting, LLM Inference), Lead AI Engineer (AI Foundations, LLM Customization and Fine-tuning), Lead Machine Learning Engineer (Finance Tech — AI Enablement), Applied Researcher I (AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI).
This is a company building its own model hosting layer, its own inference infrastructure, and its own fine-tuning pipeline. The seniority across these roles runs from Lead (equivalent to senior) to Senior Lead (principal-equivalent). Capital One isn’t hiring ML practitioners to use existing tools — it’s hiring platform engineers to build those tools at financial institution scale.
What is OpenAI hiring for in New York — and why does it matter?
OpenAI’s 6 New York roles are worth looking at specifically, because the titles reveal something about how the company is structured geographically:
AI Deployment Engineer (Startups), AI Deployment Engineer (Digital Natives), AI Deployment Engineer (Global Affairs), AI Deployment Manager (NYC), AI Deployment Manager (Pilots), Manager of AI Deployment Engineering (Enterprise).
Every single OpenAI position in New York is a deployment or go-to-market role. There are no Research Scientists, no Research Engineers, no model development roles of any kind. OpenAI is building an enterprise sales and deployment function in New York, separate from its San Francisco research center. If you want to work at OpenAI and are based in New York, the available path is customer-facing AI deployment, not research.
Writer’s 5 New York roles follow the same pattern: Enterprise AI adoption lead, Enterprise AI transformation lead, Strategic AI adoption lead, Strategic AI transformation lead, AI deployment engineer. New York is where enterprise AI companies put the people who get their products into large organizations — not the people who build the products.
Where are the junior AI roles in New York?
New York is the most accessible major AI market for early-career candidates in the index. Seven of 74 roles are classified as junior or entry-level — a 9.5% share that is higher than London (near zero), Sydney (zero), or San Francisco (low single digits).
All seven of those junior roles are at New York Life Insurance, and all are 2027 summer internships across MLOps, Data Science, Data Engineering, AI Platform, and Software Engineering. This is a structured intern batch from a large institutional employer, not a series of unrelated junior postings. The pipeline exists, the roles are concrete, and the company is large enough that interns have genuine mentorship infrastructure rather than ad hoc projects.
For Machine Learning Engineer candidates without extensive experience, New York Life’s program is the most visible early-career on-ramp in the New York market. Spotify, Capital One, and OpenAI are not running equivalent junior pipelines in NYC at current posting levels.
What role types dominate New York’s AI market?
Machine Learning Engineer is the most common explicit skill tag in New York with 18 roles — driven almost entirely by Spotify, which runs a complete ML engineering function in the city covering personalization, ads, policy and safety, and content intelligence. Spotify’s 11 New York ML roles range from Senior to Staff level, all focused on production systems rather than research.
LLM Engineer has 6 roles in New York, concentrated at Capital One (LLM Customization and Fine-tuning, LLM Gateway). AI Platform has 7, split between Capital One’s infrastructure work and MassMutual. AI Applied has 7, with Amazon’s Applied Scientists as the main contributor.
The seniority picture is mixed in a way that’s unusual for a top-5 AI market. Mid-level roles account for 53% of New York’s count (39 of 74), senior for 26% (19), junior for 9% (7, all NY Life internships), and staff/principal for 7% (5). The mid-level share is higher than Sydney’s (which ran 59% mid) and reflects the presence of employers like Capital One that hire across a range of engineering levels rather than only at the top.