Big Banks Flock to AI Hiring Amid Surge in Agent Orchestration

Wall Street's big banks are ramping up their hiring of AI professionals, with job postings for AI-related roles surging 49% this year compared to last. According to Draup, a company that analyzes public job posts and platforms like LinkedIn, there were 139,819 AI-related vacancies across institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Capital One.

The biggest spike is in the hiring of agents that work in concert with each other, with references to agent orchestration up 1,721% this year. Tools that let these agents execute tasks are also becoming more prevalent, with mentions of LangGraph used to build multistep workflows climbing 679%, and LlamaIndex, which connects applications to data sources, rising 291%. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) was up 259%.

However, banks are no longer just looking for engineers and data scientists. They're also hiring forward-deployed engineers who can embed AI in the business itself. These individuals need technical skills and hands-on knowledge of a specific function to coordinate multiple agents and decide when human intervention is needed.