Cyber Job Postings Fall to a Four-Year Low While AI Security Engineer Demand Jumps 268%: The Risers and Fallers
A new jobs report counts 26% fewer U.S. cybersecurity job postings so far this year, yet demand for AI security engineers has more than tripled. Here is the scoreboard of which roles are rising and which are falling.
The U.S. cybersecurity job market is shrinking and reshaping at the same time. Employers posted far fewer security jobs in the first nine months of 2026 than a year earlier, but the handful of roles tied to artificial intelligence and data are growing fast enough to stand out sharply against the slump.
The figures come from CyberSN’s Cybersecurity Jobs Report, as broken down by SecurityWeek. CyberSN takes deduplicated listings collected by JobSpikr and sorts them into 45 functional roles across ten categories, so it counts jobs by the work described rather than by the title an employer chose.
The headline number
235,786 postings from January through September 2026, down 26.4% from 320,210 in the same months of 2025. That is a four-year low.
Risers
- AI Security Engineer: up 268.3% year over year.
- Cyber Data Scientist: up 203.5%.
- AI in the job description: just under 15% of all postings mention AI, about level with last year’s 15.1%, but the share climbed to 20.0% in September 2026.
- Functions asking most for AI know-how: Research (32.7% of postings, up 11.7 points), Offense (23.3%, up 4.8), governance, risk and compliance (19.8%, up 2.1) and Plan (18.9%, up 0.6).
Fallers
- Cyber Insider Threat Analyst: down 55.6%, to 1,088 postings
- Cyber Risk Analyst: down 51.5%, to 4,031
- Penetration Tester: down 45.9%, to 3,063
- Cybersecurity Lead: down 41.0%, to 4,688
- Threat Hunter: down 40.0%, to 1,013
- Cybersecurity Project Manager: down 39.4%, to 783
- CISO, including CSO, BSO and ISO titles: down 38.9%, to 2,832
Footnotes that change the picture
- The CISO drop is partly a comparison effect. 2025 was an unusually strong year. This year’s 2,832 CISO postings are almost the same as 2024’s 2,808, and CISO listings rose 19.5% from the second quarter to the third.
- Remote work varies by function. The highest remote figures were in Sales (32.8%), governance, risk and compliance (31.2%), Offense (24.7%), Product Security (22.9%), Educate (22.8%), Research (21.9%) and Defense (21.3%).
- It measures the what, not the why. The report counts listings and deliberately does not try to explain the causes behind the changes, so any reasons for the decline are interpretation, not findings.
What this means for your company
Fewer postings do not mean fewer threats. They mostly reflect how employers are budgeting and which skills they think they need. For a small or mid-size business, two signals are worth noting. First, the surge in AI security roles reflects how quickly AI tools are entering everyday work, and someone in your organization should own the question of what data those tools can see. Second, a cooler market for some traditional roles may make certain skills easier to find, but most smaller firms still get better coverage by pairing one or two capable in-house people with outside monitoring and expertise than by trying to hire a full team.
Need help deciding which security skills to build in-house and which to bring in from outside? Reach out to Layer 7 Data Solutions to discuss how we’ve helped companies similar to yours.
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