Key points
- Bank AI job postings rose 49%, Draup says
- Mentions of agent orchestration jumped 1,721%
- Governance skills drew more mentions than model operations
Banks want people who can get AI agents to work together. Mentions of that skill, known as "agent orchestration," jumped 1,721% in bank job postings this year, according to hiring analytics firm Draup.
The work involves coordinating agents that handle different parts of a task. "This is arguably the hottest skill on Wall Street," Draup Chief Executive Vijay Swaminathan told CNBC.
How many AI jobs are banks posting?
Draup counted 139,819 AI-related job postings at banks including JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Citigroup (C), and Capital One (COF), up 49% this year compared with 2025.
The figures come from public job listings and platforms such as LinkedIn. CNBC did not identify the full bank sample or provide bank-by-bank totals. It also did not specify whether the comparison covers matching periods of each year.
The increase contrasts with slowing hiring across the broader economy. U.S. employers added just 29,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said Friday.
What skills do banks want?
The earlier wave of AI hiring was mostly engineers and data scientists who built models. Now banks are also seeking what are often called forward-deployed engineers, who put AI to work in areas from trading desks to back-office operations and human resources.
That work can involve coordinating several agents. One might read raw data, another might analyze a document, and a third might check it against regulations, CNBC reported. Swaminathan said even a simple process, such as approving employee vacation requests, turns into a web of special cases once agents take it over.
Mentions of tools for building agents grew, too. References to LangGraph, a framework for multistep AI workflows, rose 679%. Mentions of LlamaIndex, which connects AI apps to company data, rose 291%, and references to retrieval-augmented generation, a way of feeding company information into an AI model, rose 259%.
Why are governance skills in demand?
Banks also want people who can keep the agents in check. References to "responsible AI" in job postings rose 657%, while mentions of AI governance rose 394% and risk management 359%, according to Draup.
Governance skills now show up in more than 16,000 references in Draup's data. That's nearly twice the roughly 8,400 references tied to training, deploying, and running models.
"There is a lot of focus on making sure that the third parties that we are using in these products are not going rogue from a cybersecurity standpoint," Swaminathan said. That worry isn't hypothetical. OpenAI's own agents attacked Hugging Face's systems in July, and OpenAI now faces a lawsuit over it.
What do the jobs pay?
Generative AI managers earn a median base salary of about $190,000, according to Draup. Swaminathan said the roles are still hard to fill, so big banks are retraining their own developers and specialists. JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has talked about "huge redeployment plans" as AI takes over more work.
