Entry Level AI Jobs, No Experience: 0 of 3,004 Job Titles Use the Words (September 2026)

On September 10, 2026 we read every live posting on 19 AI and robotics company career pages — 3,799 roles, 3,004 of them in the United States with a full job description — and searched the job titles for the words beginners actually type into Google. “Entry-level” appeared zero times. “Junior” appeared zero times. “Apprentice” and “trainee” appeared zero times. Sixty-three of those 3,004 openings will genuinely take somebody with two years of experience or less, and 22 of the 63 were posted in the last seven days — so the door is not shut. It is just not labelled.

That gap between the search box and the careers page explains a lot of frustration. You search “entry level AI jobs no experience”, you get listicles promising nineteen roles, and then every posting you open wants five years. Below is what the employers’ own requirement text says, counted rather than guessed.

The word you are searching for is not printed on a single job

We checked ten labels against all 3,004 U.S. job titles. Five of them returned nothing at all.

Then we searched the full body text of all 3,004 descriptions, not just the titles. “Apprentice” still returned zero — the word does not appear anywhere on these nineteen boards. “Junior” appeared in 87 postings, and this is the part worth sitting with: in 80 of those 87 it describes somebody you would supervise. “Mentor junior teammates.” “Oversee the work of junior engineers.” Junior people plainly exist inside these companies. They are simply not being hired through the front door.

Only six postings out of 3,004 describe themselves as entry-level. Four are at xAI: two line cook roles, a food services specialist, and a facilities maintenance assistant. The other two are Nuro’s Associate Fleet Technician roles in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Two further postings use the phrase only to rule it out — OpenAI’s Technical Commodity Manager states plainly that “this is not an entry-level position.”

So at the nineteen biggest AI and robotics employers, on this particular Thursday, the jobs that call themselves entry-level are mostly cooking and cleaning for the people who build the models. That is not a joke at anyone’s expense. It is the honest shape of the market, and it is the reason the listicles feel like they are lying to you.

“Technician” is the biggest door — and it is not a beginner’s door

With 58 openings, “technician” is by far the most common starting-role word in the titles. It is also the one most likely to be mistaken for a no-experience job, because it sounds like the trades and often pays like them. So we read the requirement lines.

Of the 58, fifty-one name a number of years. The median is three. Twenty-seven of the fifty-one ask for three years or more; only three ask for one year or less. Figure AI’s Prototype Development Technician wants “5+ years of experience in mechanical or electromechanical prototyping.” OpenAI’s Datacenter Networking Technician for the Stargate build asks for “7+ years of experience in large-scale datacenter network deployment.”

The lesson is not “avoid technician roles.” It is that the word signals a trade, and trades expect you to have already served your time somewhere — an HVAC route, a fibre crew, a Navy engine room. Several xAI postings say so explicitly, accepting “equivalent military experience” in place of civilian years. If you have that background and have been assuming AI companies are not for you, you are the person these 58 postings are written for. We looked at the degree question separately in our read of every open robotics technician posting, and at one occupation in depth in how to become a data centre technician with no experience.

The 63 openings that will actually take a near-beginner

Here is how 3,004 narrows down. We kept postings whose title names a starting role — intern, co-op, new grad, fellow, resident, associate, technician — then removed anything senior-titled, then kept only those asking two years or fewer, or naming no number at all.

Twelve of the 63 publish a salary range. They run from Mercor’s $40,000–$80,000 research fellowship to OpenAI’s Prototyping Lab Technician at $225,000–$295,000 — which tells you “entry” is doing a lot of work as a word. Fourteen of the 63, newest first:

Employer	Role	Location	Years asked	Pay range	Posted
xAI	Mechanical Technician	Memphis, TN	1 year	not published	Sept 10
xAI	Fiber Technician	Memphis, TN	1 year	not published	Sept 9
Replit	Software Engineer, New Grad (2027)	Remote (Foster City, CA)	none stated	$140,000–$180,000	Sept 9
1X	Test Technician	San Carlos, CA	2 years	not published	Sept 9
xAI	Plumbing Technician	Southaven, MS / Memphis, TN	1 year	not published	Sept 8
xAI	IT Services Technician	Memphis, TN	2 years	$61,200–$91,800	Sept 8
xAI	IT Services Technician	Seattle, WA	2 years	$68,400–$102,600	Sept 8
xAI	Fire Protection Technician	Memphis, TN	2 years	not published	Sept 8
xAI	Chiller Technician	Southaven, MS / Memphis, TN	2 years	not published	Sept 8
Cursor	Software Engineer, New Grad 2027	San Francisco, CA	none stated	not published	Sept 8
Scale AI	Machine Learning Fellow	United States	none stated	not published	Sept 4
Waymo	2027 Summer Intern, BS, SysEng Software Engineer	Mountain View, CA	none stated	not published	Sept 3
Sierra	APX (New Grad 2027)	San Francisco, CA	none stated	$150,000–$180,000	Aug 31
Nuro	Associate Fleet Technician	Santa Clara, CA	none stated	not published	Aug 26

You can filter the whole set yourself — all 3,799 roles, with an apply button on each — on our jobs board, and the daily counts behind these numbers live on the AI jobs tracker.

Memphis posted eleven of them in three days

Twenty-two of the 63 went up in the last week, and eleven of those came from one place: xAI’s data centre campus around Memphis, Tennessee and Southaven, Mississippi, posted between September 8 and September 10. Chiller, plumbing, fibre, medium-voltage electrical, fire protection, facilities, controls, IT services. One to two years each, high-school diploma or equivalency, several accepting military experience.

Exactly one of the eleven publishes a pay range — the Memphis IT Services Technician at $61,200–$91,800. The other ten do not, which is consistent with what we found when we counted salary disclosure across xAI’s Memphis postings in August. If you want to understand why the published ranges are so wide when they do appear, we took that apart in our measurement of 2,172 posted ranges.

Silence about years is not an invitation

Across all 3,004 U.S. postings, 2,183 name a number of years somewhere in the requirements and 821 do not. It is tempting to read those 821 as open to anyone. They are not.

Most of the silent postings are senior engineering roles that skip the number because the seniority is already in the title and the pay. OpenAI’s Data Engineer for Monetization Data Platform names no years and pays $266,000–$510,000. Nobody is getting that without a track record. When a posting is silent, the requirement has moved into the bullet list — “you have shipped production systems at scale” — where it cannot be counted but is every bit as real.

Of the 2,183 that do name a number, the median is five years and 1,291 of them — 59 per cent — ask for five or more. Only 283 postings in the entire U.S. set ask for two years or fewer. That is the number to hold on to: 9.4 per cent of a 3,004-posting market has a bar a near-beginner can clear.

One methodological note, because it changes how you should read all of this: where a posting listed several requirements we took the smallest number it named. That is the most generous possible reading. A role asking “3+ years of Python and 5+ years of distributed systems” is counted here as three. The real bar is higher than our figures, never lower.

What a 1969 graduating class had that 2026 does not

That photograph is a graduating apprentice class at a federal research centre. The employer took people with no relevant experience, taught them a trade on site, and printed the word on the programme. Across 3,004 live postings at the companies now building the physical layer of AI, that word does not appear once — not in a title, not in a paragraph, not in a benefits list.

This is the structural fact underneath the search frustration. These are young companies scaling fast, and training somebody from zero is the one thing a fast-scaling company will not spend time on. The training infrastructure that used to sit inside the employer now sits outside it — in trade schools, in the military, in union apprenticeships, in registered programmes listed at Apprenticeship.gov. The AI companies are hiring the output of those systems without running one.

Two numbers that surprised us

Only four of 26 intern and new-grad postings name any years requirement at all. This is the cleanest door in the dataset, and it is clean precisely because it is gated on being a student instead. The catch is timing rather than experience: nearly all of them are for 2027 starts, and we found that the summer intake opens far earlier than most applicants expect.

Waymo’s “Machine Learning Engineer Perception LLM/VLM (PhD, New Grad)” asks for 5+ years of machine learning experience. The title says new grad. The requirements say half a decade. It is the single clearest illustration in the dataset that the label on the door and the lock on the door are set by different people.

What to do with this today

• Stop searching the label, search the role. “Entry-level AI jobs” returns nothing on these boards. “Technician”, “intern”, “new grad”, “fellow” and “associate” return 107 postings between them. Search the words the employers actually print.
• If you have a trade, apply this week. Eleven Memphis-area technician roles went up between September 8 and 10 asking one to two years. Trades postings fill fast, and our aging analysis found the first fortnight is where your odds live.
• If you are a student, you are already at the front of the queue. Twenty-two of 26 intern and new-grad postings name no years requirement. That advantage disappears the day you graduate — use it now.
• Read the requirement line, not the title. Waymo’s new-grad posting asks for five years. Two minutes in the bullet list saves you an hour on an application you cannot win.
• Do not pay anyone for access to these. Every posting above links to the employer’s own site and is free to apply to.

If you want to go one level deeper

Would a certificate close the gap? We checked that directly: zero of 2,974 postings asked for one. Would a PhD? Only for a specific slice — we read 2,954 postings to find where the requirement is real. Is the government route easier? Federal hiring has an explicit no-experience pathway that private boards do not, which we walked through in how to get a federal job with no experience and in every Oak Ridge posting that takes candidates without a degree.

If remote work is the real constraint, note that “remote” on these boards usually comes with a city attached — we found 248 postings tagged remote and 25 that genuinely are. If you are changing careers later in life, the age question runs the opposite way to this one and we counted it in AI jobs for people over 50. And for genuinely part-time work, 30 of 3,754 openings qualified. For the wider view of who is hiring at all, start with our count across the 20 boards and what 1,268 OpenAI and Anthropic postings actually say.

Questions people ask before they give up on the search

Are there entry level AI jobs with no experience?

Not under that name. On September 10, 2026, zero of 3,004 live U.S. postings at 19 AI and robotics companies used “entry-level”, “junior”, “apprentice” or “trainee” in the job title. Sixty-three postings will take two years of experience or fewer, and 26 intern and new-grad roles are gated on student status rather than years — but a posting that asks for literally nothing is close to nonexistent outside food service and facilities work.

Why do entry level jobs require years of experience?

Because on these boards the phrase “entry-level” is applied by candidates and job aggregators, not by the employer. The employer writes a role and a requirement line. When a fast-scaling company needs a fibre splicer, it asks for someone who has spliced fibre, because it has no training programme to fall back on. The word “apprentice” appears zero times in all 3,004 descriptions we read.

How many years of experience do AI jobs ask for?

Of the 3,004 U.S. postings, 2,183 name a number and 821 do not. The median named requirement is five years, and 1,291 postings ask for five or more. Only 283 ask for two years or fewer. Where a posting listed several requirements we counted the smallest, so the true bar is higher than these figures.

Which AI companies hire people with the least experience?

Of the 63 openings asking two years or fewer, xAI posted 12 and 1X posted 10 — a third of the total between them, almost all hardware, facilities and data-centre technician work. Waymo posted 6, and Scale AI, Figure AI and Nuro 5 each. The software route is narrower and runs almost entirely through new-grad and intern postings at Sierra, Cursor, Replit and Scale AI.

Does a posting that does not mention years mean anyone can apply?

No. 821 U.S. postings name no number, but most are senior engineering roles where the expectation sits in the bullet list instead — “you have shipped production systems at scale”. One silent posting in our set pays $266,000–$510,000. Read the responsibilities before you read the absence of a number as an opening.

Do AI data centre jobs require a degree?

Most of the Memphis-area technician postings we read this week ask for a high-school diploma or equivalency certificate and a stated number of years in the trade, not a degree. Several accept “equivalent military experience”. That is a different door from the engineering roles at the same companies.

Are the AI trainer and data labelling jobs advertised online legitimate?

Some are, many are not, and the advertised hourly rates are frequently invented. We counted the real openings in are AI training jobs legit. The four rules that matter: never pay to apply, never deposit a cheque and wire part of it back, a text-message offer is not an offer, and only apply on the employer’s own domain.

What should I search instead of “entry level AI jobs”?

Search the words that are actually printed: technician (58 postings), intern or co-op (19), associate (17), fellow or resident (16), new grad (7). Then filter by the requirement line rather than the title. You can do all of that on our jobs board, which carries every posting in this analysis.

Sources and method

On September 10, 2026 we read the public job-board APIs of 20 AI and robotics companies; 19 responded and one (Google DeepMind) returned an error, so every figure here is drawn from 19 boards. That produced 3,799 live roles, of which 3,005 are in the United States and 3,004 carried a job description long enough to parse.

Label counts are exact string matches against the job title. Years-of-experience figures are parsed from the full description text; we excluded company history, founder biographies and phrases such as “in the last five years”, and where several requirements appeared we recorded the smallest. Salary ranges are reproduced exactly as the employer published them, and “not published” means the posting carried no range. Roles are counted as U.S. by the location string on the posting.

Cite this: On September 10, 2026, none of 3,004 live U.S. job postings at 19 AI and robotics companies used “entry-level”, “junior”, “apprentice” or “trainee” in the job title; 63 postings asked for two years of experience or fewer, and the median stated requirement across the 2,183 postings naming a number was five years. Source: profhlab.com AI Jobs Desk, profhlab.com/ai-jobs-tracker/.

Counts are rebuilt every day on the tracker, every posting is searchable on the jobs board, and requests go to The Jobs Desk. New to the site? Start here. One short email a month.