AI, Digital & Trading Talent in Energy: Demand, Pay & Skills by Role
Energy employers now hire data engineers, data scientists and AI specialists to run grids, trade power and keep assets working. They compete for those people with every other industry — and the candidates rarely need energy experience to be hired elsewhere.
These pages follow that competition role by role, from open postings at energy employers: how many there are, where they are, and what the employers ask for. They cover roles where AI, data or digital work is the job itself, plus the traders and originators who buy and sell power, gas and offtake — grouped below. They are not every role in energy.
One caveat on coverage: these counts come from the careers sites of the energy employers we track — oil and gas companies, utilities and grid operators, trading houses, renewables developers — and from energy job boards. That is a broad sample, not a census: employers we do not track are missing, so read the figures as a view of the market rather than its full size.
1,585 open AI, data, digital and trading postings across 19 roles, from 22,813 open postings at 702 employers in 138 countries — last updated 5 October 2026.
AI and machine learning roles
- AI Engineer59 open postings23 senior or above · United States median USD 170,000
- ML Engineer31 open postings15 senior or above · United States median USD 198,000
- AI Architect20 open postings9 senior or above · United States median USD 160,000
- AI Product Manager19 open postings15 senior or above · United States median USD 160,000
- Generative & Agentic AI Specialist17 open postings8 senior or above · no country yet meets the pay-disclosure floor
Data roles
- Data Engineer90 open postings42 senior or above · United States median USD 155,000
- Data Scientist80 open postings42 senior or above · United States median USD 185,000
- Data Analyst60 open postings23 senior or above · United States median USD 120,000
- Analytics & BI Specialist35 open postings14 senior or above · United States median USD 160,000
- Data Governance Specialist30 open postings10 senior or above · no country yet meets the pay-disclosure floor
- Energy Forecasting & Optimisation Specialist28 open postings15 senior or above · United States median USD 146,000
Energy-digital roles
- Software Engineer454 open postings268 senior or above · United States median USD 188,000
- SCADA, Controls & Automation Engineer264 open postings118 senior or above · United States median USD 153,000
- Cyber & OT Security Specialist150 open postings60 senior or above · United States median USD 170,000
- Energy Trading Quant & Analyst78 open postings34 senior or above · United States median USD 131,000
- Digital Product & Transformation Specialist59 open postings17 senior or above · no country yet meets the pay-disclosure floor
- Data Centre Power Engineer15 open postings8 senior or above · no country yet meets the pay-disclosure floor
Trading and commercial roles
How these pages are counted
A posting counts as open if it was seen on an employer's careers site or an energy job board in the last 21 days, and each is counted once. A role gets its own page once at least 10 open postings are tracked — 5 for the narrower energy-specific roles — and every page refreshes each Monday.
Pay is shown only where postings disclose it, as a median per country with the number of postings behind it. The skills table is counted by code from the posting text, not written by a model; the short summary at the top of each page is written by a model from those same counts.
Hiring for one of these roles? Paste its job description for a hiring-feasibility brief: whether it can be filled, at what price, and who else could do it.
Planning further ahead? See where the energy training pipeline stands, region by region, in the words of each region's own training bodies.