Key findings
- 1
On 18 Oct 2026, 15 roles at 8 companies were open to source, license or acquire data (7 at AI labs, 8 at vendors), beside 20 roles building RL environments.
- 2
OpenAI has the most data-acquisition and partnership roles open (5).
- 3
8 of these roles state a salary: Full-Stack SWE, Data Acquisition (Foundations) at OpenAI, $295K to $536K a year, Research Program Manager, Data Acquisition at OpenAI, $239K to $328K a year and Software Engineer - Data Aquisition (systems) at OpenAI, $295K to $536K a year.
Figure 1
Who is hiring to buy training data
Which labs and vendors have people whose job is to source, license or acquire data, or to build RL environments from it?
| Company | Side | Data acquisition and partnership roles | RL environment roles |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | AI lab | 2 | |
| Handshake | Data vendor | 2 | |
| AfterQuery | Data vendor | 1 | |
| Mistral AI | AI lab | 1 | |
| Scale AI | Data vendor | 1 | |
| Snorkel AI | Data vendor | 0 | |
| Thinking Machines Lab | AI lab | 0 | |
| Toloka | Data vendor | 0 | |
| Mercor | Data vendor | 4 | |
| Cohere | AI lab | 2 | |
| Labelbox | Data vendor | 2 | |
| Prime Intellect | Data vendor | 2 | |
| Anthropic | AI lab | 1 | |
| Cursor (Anysphere) | AI lab | 1 | |
| Magic | AI lab | 1 |
Sample. Roles open on the public boards of 25 AI labs and 14 human-data vendors on 18 Oct 2026.
Data acquisition and partnership roles: titles naming data partnerships, acquisition, licensing, sourcing or data deals. RL environment roles: titles naming RL or agentic environments, which are built from purchased or commissioned data.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, Who Is Buying AI Training Data, read 18 Oct 2026.
Figure 2
Every data-acquisition and partnership role open today
Which roles exactly, and where?
Sample. 15 roles, each linked to its posting, read on 18 Oct 2026.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, Who Is Buying AI Training Data, read 18 Oct 2026.
Figure 3
Which lab and vendor boards were read
Whose hiring does this report see?
Sample. 39 public job boards, read on 18 Oct 2026.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, Who Is Buying AI Training Data, read 18 Oct 2026.
For labs, data vendors and researchers
Buy the data behind this report
The figures above are a summary. Behind them are records we collect ourselves, every day:
9,572 roles tracked, each with its history
Every role on 29 job boards, read daily since 13 Jul 2026: its pay and place, and the first and last day it was open.
6,200 apply clicks in 28 days
Which roles people actually apply to, by field, pay and kind of work. It happens on this site, so nobody else can count it.
39 lab and vendor hiring boards
The job boards of 25 AI labs and 14 human-data vendors, read every day: who is hiring for human data, and who is hiring to buy it.
What you can buy
The records
The rows behind any figure, with their history, not only the totals.
A regular feed
The same figures every week or month, as files.
A custom cut or benchmark
Your countries, languages or fields, or your own platform against the market.
Method and definitions
The public job boards (Greenhouse and Ashby APIs) of AI labs and human-data vendors, read every day. Every figure is computed by one database query over the window shown, the same query for the live report and for every edition. Each figure states its sample beneath it.
- Data-acquisition role
- A lab role in data partnerships, acquisition, licensing, sourcing or deals, or a vendor role in data acquisition and partnerships, by the published patterns.
- RL environment role
- A role building reinforcement-learning or agentic environments, which are built from bought or commissioned data.
- Window
- A reading of every board today; no monthly editions.
What this data cannot tell you
- Labs without a public board API (Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Google DeepMind's own careers site) cannot be read, so their hiring is not counted.
- An open role is hiring intent, not headcount: some companies keep one evergreen posting per team, others post one per location.
- A role counts by its title and team against published patterns; a role described only in its text is not counted.
- A buying team can exist without an open role; an open role shows a team being built or replaced.
How the job feeds are read and roles are classified: site methodology. How fresh, complete and consistent the data is, checked every day: data quality and coverage.
Editions
This report reads the live job boards every day. Past boards cannot be read again, so it has no monthly editions: download the data to keep a dated copy.
- Live data (this page)Today's boards, read daily
Cite and reuse
Free to quote, chart and republish under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. Live figures change daily: cite a monthly edition for numbers that will read the same later, or keep the access date.
Citation
AITraining.jobs (2026). Who Is Buying AI Training Data (live data, 18 Oct 2026 to 18 Oct 2026). https://www.aitraining.team/research/who-is-buying-ai-training-data (accessed 18 Oct 2026)
BibTeX
@misc{aitrainingjobs_who_is_buying_ai_training_data_live,
author = {{AITraining.jobs}},
title = {Who Is Buying AI Training Data (live data, 18 Oct 2026 to 18 Oct 2026)},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://www.aitraining.team/research/who-is-buying-ai-training-data}},
note = {Accessed 18 Oct 2026},
}More research
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