Recomputed every morning · 2026-10-20
Do these jobs need a doctorate?
Most never say. 718 of 996 parsed postings, 72%, do not raise a doctorate at all.
72%
of parsed postings never raise a doctorate at all: 718 of 996. That is the number this page can stand behind, and on its own it answers the question most people arrive with.
The other 278 do mention one. This page used to tell you how many of those required it. It no longer does, because the answer was wrong twice. One version read "Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD" as a requirement and reported 117 postings requiring a doctorate when the real figure was closer to a dozen. The version that replaced it read "a PhD in Computer Science or related field is required" as optional, because the words "or related field" sat nearby. Publishing a third number before the reading is dependable would be repeating the same mistake with better wording, so the count is gone until it can be trusted.
What a mention does and does not tell you
A posting that raises a doctorate might be requiring one, might be offering it as an alternative to years of experience, might be listing it beside a bachelor's and a master's as one acceptable option, or might be describing the team you would join. Those are four different messages to a candidate and they are written in language that looks almost identical:
- "Basic qualifications: PhD in computer science" — a requirement.
- "8+ years of experience, or a PhD with 4+ years" — not a requirement. The doctorate is one of two ways in.
- "Required qualifications: PhD, or equivalent industry experience" — the heading says required and the sentence takes it back.
- "Our team includes several PhD researchers" — not a requirement at all.
Reading those apart reliably is the part this board has not got right yet. Detecting whether a doctorate is mentioned is straightforward and is what the figures on this page are built from.
Which disciplines raise it
How often a doctorate comes up at all, by track. Read this as where the subject arises, not as where it is demanded.
| Track | Postings | Raise a doctorate | Never mention one |
|---|---|---|---|
| Post-Training & RL | 220 | 93 | 127 |
| Evals & Benchmarks | 418 | 144 | 274 |
| Alignment & Interpretability | 67 | 17 | 50 |
| Human Data & Annotation | 178 | 18 | 160 |
| Red Team & Safeguards | 97 | 6 | 91 |
| Observability & Tooling | 16 | 0 | 16 |
Counts, not shares, and no requirement rate. Tracks need fifteen parsed postings to appear.
Years of experience, where stated
Only 200 postings put a number on it, so treat this as a shape rather than a distribution. Pay is shown only where five or more of that bucket publish a band.
| Years asked for | Postings | Median pay |
|---|---|---|
| 1 year | 11 | $262k |
| 2 years | 27 | $245k |
| 3 years | 29 | $213k |
| 4 years | 28 | $300k |
| 5 years | 56 | $240k |
| 6 years | 10 | $255k |
| 7 years | 10 | — |
| 8 years | 17 | $295k |
| 9 years | 2 | — |
| 10 years | 10 | $319k |
There is no clean ladder in that column, which is itself the finding. Stated years and published pay are close to uncorrelated on this board, because seniority in these postings is carried by the title rather than by a number of years.
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