Wall Street banks increase AI hiring as agent orchestration grows

Draup found that AI-related job postings at JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Capital One rose 49% from 2025 to 139,819 listings.[1] Draup provided the analysis exclusively to CNBC, and its methodology draws on public job postings and platforms including LinkedIn.[1] For workforce planning, the figures offer a view of advertised demand across the three firms, not a count of new employees.[1]

References to agent orchestration in job postings increased 1,721% this year, according to Draup.[1] In this hiring context, Draup defines the skill as designing agents to work together on a task.[1] CNBC’s report describes banks moving beyond chatbots to a next phase of AI strategy, with examples including inspecting raw data, analyzing documents and checking regulatory compliance.[1] Postings also increasingly referenced LangGraph, a framework for building multistep workflows, up 679%; LlamaIndex, which helps connect AI applications to data, up 291%; and retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, up 259%.[1]

The hiring shift extends from engineers and data scientists who build or adapt models to workers embedding AI in business lines.[1] Those workers are often called forward-deployed engineers, and they need both technical skills and knowledge of the business function they serve.[1] That combination suggests teams hiring for applied AI may need to assess candidates on domain understanding as well as technical capability.[1] Draup’s analysis also found renewed emphasis in postings on problem solving, creativity, asking tough questions and assertiveness.[1]

Draup found that job-posting references to responsible AI rose 657% this year, while mentions of AI governance rose 394% and risk-management mentions rose 359%.[1] Its data includes more than 16,000 references to governance-related skills, nearly twice the roughly 8,400 references to model training, deployment and operations.[1] Security teams are focused on preventing third-party tools or external model connections from creating systemic vulnerabilities.[1] Draup puts the median base salary for generative AI managers at about $190,000, and CNBC reports that generative AI and agent-related roles typically pay more than other technology roles in finance.[1] Swaminathan said banks are finding specialized AI roles difficult to fill, while major banks are leaning heavily on internal reskilling.[1]