AI Infrastructure Skill Map
Which skills each layer of the stack is hiring for — extracted from full job descriptions (ATS boards), normalized into a skill graph. Hiring requirements are a leading indicator of which technologies are winning. Not investment advice.
Source: required/preferred skills extracted from full ATS job descriptions; demand = number of open roles.
L2 · Optical & Networking
PCIe99Ethernet93CXL87Python87UALink81NVLink76silicon-photonics62Verilog/RTL42AI Infrastructure31SystemVerilog26SerDes24Signal integrity24Tcl24Git21SoC Design21Perl20Physical Design20Silicon Bring-up20
L4 · Chips
RISC-V103Python76Verilog/RTL50AI Accelerators46Physical Design26SystemVerilog21PPA Optimization20Silicon Bring-up20Compilers19Distributed systems19hardware-software-co-design19PyTorch19Design Verification18Tcl18Semiconductors17Synthesis17CI/CD16computer-architecture16
L5 · Training & Inference
Kubernetes116Python85Distributed systems77Go72Observability55Cloud Infrastructure45CI/CD36AI Infrastructure34Grafana34Prometheus31LLM-Inference29Incident-Response26capacity planning25Model-Serving24HPC23AWS22GCP21vLLM21
L6 · Foundation Models
Python98Distributed systems50Kubernetes50AWS37GCP35Large Language Models34machine-learning33AI-safety32LLMs30Reinforcement Learning30Rust30Observability29distributed-training28SQL25CI/CD24Go23Incident-Response22PyTorch22
L7 · Middleware
Vector-databases12API Design4Distributed systems4Go4Observability4RAG4Rust4Cloud Infrastructure3Data Engineering3databases3information-retrieval3Infrastructure-as-Code3Kubernetes3machine-learning3Pulumi3Terraform3Weaviate3Adobe Illustrator2
L8 · Applications
AI Agents110Python94Conversational AI60LLMs53TypeScript50AWS46Distributed systems46Go37Devin34SQL32Agentic AI30Generative AI30Kubernetes29CI/CD27AI24GCP24Observability24Rust24