Across the six companies, the typical opening asks for experience rather than potential. OpenAI and Anthropic hire almost no juniors, for instance, at 0 to 2% of roles, and they ask for 7 to 8 years of experience. One result is counter-intuitive, however, because the corporate functions turn out to be more senior than the AI research and ML teams, at 74% senior-or-above versus 65%. This is simply because these companies run a small, experienced back office rather than large junior teams.
Each bar splits a company's open roles by seniority, and every bar sums to 100%. xAI looks junior-heavy only because of its entry-level annotation roles, the "AI tutors", and not because it runs a real junior pipeline.
Read across each row: the barrier to entry is experience. Senior-or-above roles dominate and stated minimums run to several years, while the one junior-heavy column, xAI, reflects annotation work rather than a graduate intake.
| Company | Senior or above | Junior | Min. years required (median) | Mention a degree | PhD in research/ML |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | 88% | 2% | 8 | 22% | 10% |
| Cohere | 73% | 6% | 5 | 25% | 16% |
| ElevenLabs | 44% | 6% | 5 | 5% | n.s. |
| Mistral | 59% | 6% | 5 | 60% | 41% |
| OpenAI | 83% | 0% | 7 | 13% | 12% |
| xAI | 38% | 11% | 3 | 55% | 0% |
These are the six job families used throughout the study. They are ranked by their share of senior-or-above roles. Corporate functions (finance, legal, HR, strategy) sit near the top. The AI research and ML teams sit lower, and that is where the rare junior openings are.
| Job family | Roles | Senior or above | Junior | Min. years required (median) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Safety, security & policy | 129 | 82% | 1% | 5 |
| Go-to-market | 519 | 77% | 2% | 7 |
| Software & product | 295 | 75% | 2% | 5 |
| Corporate functions | 294 | 74% | 6% | 7 |
| AI research & ML | 203 | 65% | 3% | 5 |
| Infrastructure & data | 329 | 60% | 5% | 5 |
How to read: seniority is taken from the job title. When the title is silent, it is inferred from the experience and scope in the posting. "Min. years required" is the median of the explicit minimums stated in the postings, such as "7+ years". It is computed only over the roughly two thirds of roles that state one, and left blank otherwise. "Mention a degree" is the share of a company's roles citing any degree or certification. "PhD in research/ML" is the share of its research and ML roles citing a doctorate, shown where at least eight such roles exist. Source: the six companies' career sites, July 2026.