Nearly two years after ChatGPT brought generative AI to everyone’s fingertips, the buzzy technology remains a bright spot for Seattle-area companies.

But landing an AI job isn’t as easy as the hype would lead you to believe.

After years of rolling layoffs and cost-cutting efforts, Big Tech is reluctant to expand its head count, even when investing in AI. Startups are emerging in Seattle, and venture capitalists are eager to pour money into the next Big Tech advancement, but those fledgling companies aren’t posting many jobs yet.

That leaves tech workers facing an uncertain job market — even in Seattle, widely considered one of the AI tech hubs.

“At this point, in Seattle, you can throw a rock and hit an AI vendor,” said Nabeel Chowdhury, senior vice president of operations at Seattle-based recruiting firm 24 Seven Talent.

But, the Big Tech giants are “having trouble hiring for some of this skill set because there are only so many people with years of this experience,” Chowdhury said. “If anybody is hiring at a tech company, it’s the AI team.”

Seattle-area companies are generally slower to hire than those of other markets. Amazon, the city’s largest employer, is slower than its Eastside rival Microsoft. For job seekers, companies are shelling out for senior level talent, but entry and junior level workers are struggling to get their foot in the door.

The Seattle Times spoke with 11 AI jobs experts — from recruiters to academics to venture capitalists — about what’s happening in the region’s AI job market. Here’s what we learned.

Seattle is slower to hire than other tech hubs

Seattle is among the nation’s top AI hubs. Just how high it ranks depends on who is doing the analysis — but no matter how researchers slice it, the city has employers that want workers with AI skills and people who want to work on the latest tech innovation.

Seattle ranked second after San Francisco in commercial real estate firm CBRE’s 2024 Scoring Tech Talent report, for the second consecutive year.

Chmura Economics and Analytics, a consulting and data firm based in Virginia, found that job postings requiring AI skills in the Seattle metro area grew 166% over the last year, to about 3,200 open positions.

Commercial real estate firm JLL found a lower number of AI job postings in the Puget Sound region — 1,300 openings as of August — but said that was the fourth-highest number of AI jobs nationwide.

The region fell behind the Bay Area, Calif., with 3,600 jobs, New York with 2,000 and Washington, D.C., with 1,900.

But, Seattle is taking longer to fill open AI roles than other cities, JLL found.

Among the top AI job markets, open positions stayed up for a median of 17 days as of August. In Seattle, postings remained up for nearly twice as long, a median of 33 days.

Chmura Economics similarly found Seattle companies are taking longer to hire than in the past. Over the last year, it took an average of 37 days to fill an AI job posting in the region, compared with 15 days a year earlier.

That points to “labor tightness,” said Mike Chmura, an economist at Chmura. “The race for AI talent has really heated up over the last year.”

Amazon is leading the hiring lag

Amazon — the top tech employer in the Seattle area and Washington — is taking the longest to hire, two research reports found.

It took Amazon an average of 42 days to fill an open AI role in the last year, compared with 24 days for Microsoft, according to Chmura Economics.

Amazon hired 329 AI engineers from January through September, while Microsoft hired 414, according to workplace analytics platform Aura Intelligence.

But, even with the hiring lag, Amazon and Microsoft are searching for the largest number of AI employees than any company in King County, according to an analysis done for The Seattle Times by the University of Maryland.

The two tech giants likely started to staff AI talent long before other companies in the region, which could contribute to the recent slowdown. They have also faced waves of rolling layoffs and, in an effort to save costs, are sometimes moving employees into new, AI-centric roles rather than hiring new workers.

Both companies had two years of massive growth in AI job postings, before slowing down in 2023. Amazon and Microsoft both ramped up postings again in the first half of this year.

Amazon had more than 7,500 AI job postings in 2021, more than 6,000 in 2022 and more than 1,000 in 2023, according to the analysis from the University of Maryland. In the first six months of 2024, it posted more than 2,600 roles.

Microsoft, which posted the second-highest number of AI jobs in the Seattle area, had about 3,200 AI openings in 2021, nearly 2,000 in 2022 and 860 in 2023. In the first half of 2024, it had 1,500 AI job postings.

That’s not a surprise, said Anil Gupta, a researcher from the University of Maryland who analyzed the King County data. “Of course Amazon and Microsoft are the big numbers, as we would expect.”

Margaret Callahan, a spokesperson for Amazon, said the company has thousands of employees working on AI initiatives, adding that its internal data is the only reliable way to determine Amazon’s hiring practices. Amazon fills AI roles faster or at about the same rate in Seattle as it does in other markets, she continued.

“We’re proud that our hometown Seattle has such strong tech talent, and we’re hiring for AI roles here, in other cities in the U.S., and around the world,” Callahan said.

Microsoft declined to provide its own data, but said AI is a part of many roles in the company, so it is difficult to pinpoint an exact data point.

Don’t count out Meta

The “big movers” are Amazon and Microsoft, but California-based Meta is making its mark as a “smaller player” in King County, Gupta found.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has had the third-highest number of AI job postings in King County — behind Amazon and Microsoft — for three of the last four years. Google briefly surpassed it in 2023.

Though still a fraction of the thousands of roles Amazon and Microsoft sought this year, Meta posted about 500 AI jobs in King County from January to July, according to Gupta’s analysis.

Google, in the fourth spot, posted about 400, followed by 150 AI job openings at Apple and 130 at Oracle.

In Seattle and nationally, Meta had the highest percentage of AI job growth among the tech giants over the last year, according to Joshua Poore, associate vice president focused on machine learning and AI at the recruiter Harnham. It also had the lowest attrition rate nationally.

“They are not only bringing in a lot more AI talent — but they’re losing a lot less AI talent as well,” Poore said.

Meta increased its AI-related head count in Seattle by 56% over the last year, compared with 20% growth at Amazon and 14% at Microsoft, based on Poore’s data. Nationally, Meta increased AI roles by 59%, while Apple and Amazon trailed behind at 3%.

Over the last year, Meta reported just 1% attrition, while Apple reported 9%, Microsoft 14% and Amazon 16%.

Meta also declined to comment for this story.

Callahan, from Amazon, said average corporate employee tenure at the company has increased every year since 2021.

Poore cautioned that Meta’s growth spurt doesn’t mean it’s going to surpass the other tech giants. Instead, it shows that Amazon and Microsoft “were probably ahead of the curve” in hiring AI talent and, now, Meta is investing more to get in the race.

It’s really hard to find a job

Seattle is a “tale of two cities” right now, said Kirby Winfield, founding general partner at venture capital firm Ascend.

Workers with coveted AI skills can “control their own destiny,” choosing where they work, what they work on and when they decide to try something new. Tech workers who don’t have the acronym AI on their résumé aren’t finding the same freedom.

AI startups are still small enough that there’s not a surge in hiring. And because AI is able to take on so many tasks, new AI-centric startups may not need as many supporting workers as earlier waves of tech advancements. Tech giants are still running lean after more than two years of layoffs.

Chmura, from the Virginia-based economics firm, broke it down to supply and demand.

Seattle has a higher supply of AI résumés than AI job postings.

Washington, D.C., Chicago and some Texas cities saw the opposite, Chmura found, with AI job postings outpacing local résumés. But several cities that pride themselves on being a tech hub were in the same trough as Seattle, including Boston, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Seattle area’s résumé-to-job ad ratio sat at 1.07, Chmura found, while Los Angeles was 1.3 and San Francisco was 1.5.

Anneliese Vance-Sherman, chief labor economist with Washington’s Employment Security Department, said the tech industry appears to be in a “holding pattern,” with little change in employment rates over the last two years.

The information sector, one way to gauge the tech industry, has continued to “show up as an industry that has lost a lot of jobs,” Vance-Sherman said. “Usually, tech has a lot of turnover and people are able to jump from one job to another. We’ve got this moment (now) when you’re seeing a loss of jobs.

“You’ve got this overall growth in a lot of other industries, and it doesn’t feel that way or look that way in tech.”

Some companies, like Amazon, have said they hope to be even more efficient next year. The tech giants that are hiring are selective in where they invest. Some are moving workers into new roles to prioritize AI projects, rather than bringing on new hires.

AI jobs are bucking the job loss trend. In the first half of this year, there was a 20% layoff rate in the tech industry — but a 15% surge in AI job postings, said Evan Sohn, CEO of Aura Intelligence.

In Seattle, the divide extends beyond the AI haves and have-nots: Senior level AI talent have their pick of roles, or funding for their own venture, but entry and junior level workers are struggling to find work.

“If you’re a junior person trying to get into the industry right now, there’s not enough demand out there — even with AI,” said Chowdhury. “They only want senior level individuals that have been doing this work for a while.”

That could leave a gap for the future workforce, Chowdhury said “You’re willing to invest in the more senior folks (but) at some point, you probably will run out of talent.”

Companies aren’t paying more for all AI talent

Some companies consider senior AI talent as valuable as a Seattle Mariners player.

Jacob Colker, managing director of AI2 Incubator, a Seattle-based startup accelerator, said the upper bound of AI engineers can make $800,000 a year. That’s as much as some players on the Mariners’ roster.

“Bigger companies are in an arms race right now to out-AI each other,” Colker said. “That’s what Wall Street’s rewarding, and they’re doing it.”

But, just as with job openings, the amount of money a company will invest to attract AI talent varies based on experience level. For entry or junior level talent, Amazon and Microsoft are paying about the same wage for jobs that require AI skills and those that do not, according to data from Chmura Economics.

The median wage for a job posting that mentions AI skills at Amazon or Microsoft in Seattle, Tacoma or Bellevue is $126,900. That’s compared to a median wage of $128,100 for job postings for software developers at the same companies in the same region.

When filtering for roles that require more than five years’ experience, job postings with AI skills pay a median wage of $151,500 while job postings for software developers pay $151,100.

There’s not a significant difference between pay for similar roles at Amazon and Microsoft in Seattle, Tacoma and Bellevue, according to the Chmura analysis. The median wage for Amazon was $124,100, while Microsoft was $126,900. Chmura cautioned that only about 3% of Amazon job postings included a wage.

There isn’t one AI winner

So far, there isn’t one company that is pulling ahead in attracting AI talent, recruiters, academics and analysts told The Seattle Times.

It depends on a variety of factors, including pay, remote work, the types of AI projects a company is working on and each job seeker’s desire to start something new or work within an existing corporate framework.

Chowdhury, from 24 Seven Talent, said it would be hard not to mention Microsoft as a top contender because of its partnership with OpenAI, the creator of the buzzy generative AI bot ChatGPT. But, at the same time, he said “I would never personally bet against Amazon.”

Winfield, from Ascend, wouldn’t go so far as to say Amazon was having trouble securing AI workers, but did say “the most interesting work happening in AI is not happening there.”

Poore, from Harnham, wouldn’t rank the tech giants against one another but said a job seeker’s perception of the company’s success would certainly impact where they chose to work. “People always want to be surrounded by the best in the industry.”

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