Neuronify

AI agents (agentic AI)

Systems where a language model decides which steps to take — calling tools, reading results, and continuing — instead of answering once and stopping.

Hiring data as of September 20, 2026 · refreshed daily

companies naming it
37 of 47companies naming it
open roles naming it
261open roles naming it
of those based in NYC
139of those based in NYC
median posted base (n=87)
$220kmedian posted base (n=87)

What AI agents means

An agent is a language model run in a loop: it is given a goal and a set of tools, chooses an action, observes the result, and decides what to do next until the task is done or it gives up. The model supplies the judgment; the surrounding code supplies the tools, the memory, the limits, and the record of what happened.

Agentic systems fail differently from single-call applications. Errors compound across steps, costs scale with how long the loop runs, and a wrong action can have side effects in a real system. Most of the engineering work is therefore in what surrounds the model: tool design, permissioning, evaluation of whole trajectories rather than single answers, and knowing when to hand off to a person.

AI agents in New York job posts

37 of the 47 New York AI companies we track name AI agents in at least one open role today, across 261 postings. 139 of those are based in New York; the rest are remote or in the companies’ other offices.

Engineering roles make up 45% of the postings that name it, with the rest spread across other functions.

How to read it

Among the most-named concepts in the data, close behind LLMs themselves, and it spans functions: engineers build the agents, forward-deployed and solutions roles fit them to a customer’s workflow, and go-to-market roles sell them. For an engineering role, be ready to talk about a failure you traced through a multi-step run, not just a demo that worked.

What these roles pay

$179k25th percentile
$220kMedian
$255k75th percentile

Midpoints of 87 distinct salary ranges posted on New York roles that name AI agents. Base salary only; on-target earnings are excluded, and a range repeated across one company’s postings counts once. For comparison, the median across all New York engineering postings is $215k. A term’s pay reflects the roles that name it as much as the skill itself — see the role mix below before reading a premium into it. Full bands by function and seniority are in the NYC salary calculator.

Trend

We began extracting this term from posting text on September 20, 2026. Job descriptions disappear when a role is filled, so the series cannot be backfilled; a trend line appears here once a week of data exists.

Who names it

Open roles naming AI agents, by company.

Also: Basis, Clay, Grow Therapy, Patlytics, Pinecone, Rogo, Alloy, Modal, Rillet, Sixfold, Arthur, Attentive, Comet, H1, Mirage (fka Captions), Preql, Runway, SmarterDx, Andela, Anterior, April, Maven Clinic, Spade, Tennr, Vic.ai.

Which roles

The same postings, by function and by seniority.

  • Engineering118
  • GTM66
  • Operations26
  • Other18
  • Design10
  • Product10
  • Mid146
  • Senior53
  • Staff/Principal34
  • Manager11
  • Entry9
  • Director4

Named alongside AI agents

Terms that appear in the same postings far more often than chance would put them there. The number is how many of the 37 companies pair the two.

Open roles naming AI agents

A sample from today’s data, New York roles first and one per company before any repeats. Links go to the employer’s own posting. For the full market, see AI jobs in NYC.

On the AI in NYC Show

How this is counted

Every day we read the open roles on the public job boards of the New York AI companies in our coverage — the NYC AI 100 and the AI in NYC Show roster. This term is matched against each role’s description after removing the text a company repeats across its postings, so an “About us” paragraph cannot tag every role the company has open. A vendor’s own postings never count toward its own name.

The figure means named in a job posting. It does not mean used in production, and a “nice to have” counts the same as a requirement. Companies are the headline number because posting counts are dominated by whichever few employers are hiring hardest this month.

Full method, including the pay rules, is on the glossary index; the underlying series is the NYC AI Hiring Index.

AI agents — common questions

What does AI agents mean in an AI job posting?

Systems where a language model decides which steps to take — calling tools, reading results, and continuing — instead of answering once and stopping. Among the most-named concepts in the data, close behind LLMs themselves, and it spans functions: engineers build the agents, forward-deployed and solutions roles fit them to a customer’s workflow, and go-to-market roles sell them. For an engineering role, be ready to talk about a failure you traced through a multi-step run, not just a demo that worked.

How many New York AI companies are hiring for AI agents?

As of September 20, 2026, 37 of the 47 New York AI companies we track name AI agents in the description of at least one open role, across 261 postings (139 based in New York). The count refreshes daily from the companies’ own job boards.

What do roles that ask for AI agents pay in New York?

Across 87 distinct posted salary ranges on New York roles naming AI agents, the median midpoint is $220k base, with the middle half between $179k and $255k. The same figure for all New York engineering postings is $215k. These are employer-posted ranges required by New York’s pay transparency law, base salary only.

Which skills are asked for alongside AI agents?

In the same postings, the terms most distinctively paired with AI agents are Tool use, MCP, RAG, Prompt engineering, Fine-tuning. We rank pairings by how much more often they appear together than apart, so near-universal terms such as Python do not crowd out the informative ones.

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