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AI skills glossary · Infrastructure & operations

GPUs

The parallel processors that train and serve modern models. In a posting, the word marks a role that works close to the hardware.

Hiring data as of November 14, 2026, refreshed daily. All terms in the AI skills glossary

companies naming it
7 of 47companies naming it
open roles naming it
26open roles naming it
of those based in NYC
12of those based in NYC
median posted base (n=8)
$238kmedian posted base (n=8)

What GPUs means

Graphics processing units run the large matrix operations that neural networks consist of, thousands at a time. Training and serving modern models depends on them, and on the software that makes them usable — CUDA, kernel libraries, and the schedulers that share scarce capacity across teams.

Most AI application engineers never touch a GPU directly; the provider’s API hides it. The people who do are building or optimizing models, running inference infrastructure, or writing the kernels themselves, and that last group is small.

GPUs in New York job posts

7 of the 47 New York AI companies we track name GPUs in at least one open role today, across 26 postings. 12 of those are based in New York; the rest are remote or in the companies’ other offices.

This is engineering vocabulary: 65% of the postings that name it are Engineering roles.

Modal alone accounts for 14 of the 26 postings, which is why we lead with the company count: one employer’s hiring push should not read as a market trend.

How to read it

A reliable marker of infrastructure, research, or performance roles. It travels with CUDA, vLLM, TensorRT, distributed training, and quantization in the same postings — a cluster that barely overlaps with the agents-and-RAG cluster. Decide which of the two you are before applying to either.

What these roles pay

$215k25th percentile
$238kMedian
$250k75th percentile

Midpoints of 8 distinct salary ranges posted on New York roles that name GPUs. Base salary only; on-target earnings are excluded, and a range repeated across one company’s postings counts once. For comparison, the median across all New York engineering postings is $215k. A term’s pay reflects the roles that name it as much as the skill itself — see the role mix below before reading a premium into it. Full bands by function and seniority are in the NYC salary calculator.

Companies naming GPUs, daily

Count of companies with at least one open role naming the term. We read between 46 and 47 companies a day over this period, so a move of one or two is noise.

05107Sep 20Nov 14Sep 20: 5 companiesSep 21: 5 companiesSep 22: 5 companiesSep 23: 6 companiesSep 24: 6 companiesSep 25: 6 companiesSep 26: 6 companiesSep 27: 6 companiesSep 28: 6 companiesSep 29: 6 companiesSep 30: 6 companiesOct 1: 6 companiesOct 2: 6 companiesOct 3: 6 companiesOct 4: 6 companiesOct 5: 6 companiesOct 6: 6 companiesOct 7: 6 companiesOct 8: 6 companiesOct 9: 6 companiesOct 10: 6 companiesOct 11: 6 companiesOct 12: 6 companiesOct 13: 6 companiesOct 14: 6 companiesOct 15: 6 companiesOct 16: 6 companiesOct 17: 6 companiesOct 18: 6 companiesOct 19: 6 companiesOct 20: 6 companiesOct 21: 6 companiesOct 22: 6 companiesOct 23: 6 companiesOct 24: 6 companiesOct 25: 6 companiesOct 26: 6 companiesOct 27: 6 companiesOct 28: 6 companiesOct 29: 6 companiesOct 30: 6 companiesOct 31: 6 companiesNov 1: 6 companiesNov 2: 6 companiesNov 3: 6 companiesNov 4: 6 companiesNov 5: 7 companiesNov 6: 7 companiesNov 7: 7 companiesNov 8: 7 companiesNov 9: 7 companiesNov 10: 7 companiesNov 11: 7 companiesNov 12: 7 companiesNov 13: 7 companiesNov 14: 7 companies
View as table
Datecompanies
2026-09-205
2026-09-215
2026-09-225
2026-09-236
2026-09-246
2026-09-256
2026-09-266
2026-09-276
2026-09-286
2026-09-296
2026-09-306
2026-10-016
2026-10-026
2026-10-036
2026-10-046
2026-10-056
2026-10-066
2026-10-076
2026-10-086
2026-10-096
2026-10-106
2026-10-116
2026-10-126
2026-10-136
2026-10-146
2026-10-156
2026-10-166
2026-10-176
2026-10-186
2026-10-196
2026-10-206
2026-10-216
2026-10-226
2026-10-236
2026-10-246
2026-10-256
2026-10-266
2026-10-276
2026-10-286
2026-10-296
2026-10-306
2026-10-316
2026-11-016
2026-11-026
2026-11-036
2026-11-046
2026-11-057
2026-11-067
2026-11-077
2026-11-087
2026-11-097
2026-11-107
2026-11-117
2026-11-127
2026-11-137
2026-11-147

Who names it

Open roles naming GPUs, by company.

  • Modal14
  • Normal Computing4
  • Runway3
  • Mirage (fka Captions)2
  • ElevenLabs1
  • K Health1
  • Slingshot AI1

Which roles

The same postings, by function and by seniority.

  • Engineering17
  • Research5
  • GTM2
  • Design1
  • Other1
  • Mid10
  • Staff/Principal10
  • Entry3
  • Senior2
  • Manager1

Named alongside GPUs

Terms that appear in the same postings far more often than chance would put them there. The number is how many of the 7 companies pair the two.

  • TensorRT 2
  • Triton 3
  • SGLang 2
  • CUDA 3
  • vLLM 2
  • Distributed training 2
  • Quantization and distillation 3
  • Inference 5
  • Rust 5
  • MLOps 2

Open roles naming GPUs

A sample from today’s data, New York roles first and one per company before any repeats. Links go to the employer’s own posting. For the full market, see AI jobs in NYC.

On the AI in NYC Show

How this is counted

Every day we read the open roles on the public job boards of the New York AI companies in our coverage — the NYC AI 100 and the AI in NYC Show roster. This term is matched against each role’s description after removing the text a company repeats across its postings, so an “About us” paragraph cannot tag every role the company has open. A vendor’s own postings never count toward its own name.

The figure means named in a job posting. It does not mean used in production, and a “nice to have” counts the same as a requirement. Companies are the headline number because posting counts are dominated by whichever few employers are hiring hardest this month.

Full method, including the pay rules, is on the glossary index; the underlying series is the NYC AI Hiring Index.

GPUs: common questions

What does GPUs mean in an AI job posting?

The parallel processors that train and serve modern models. In a posting, the word marks a role that works close to the hardware. A reliable marker of infrastructure, research, or performance roles. It travels with CUDA, vLLM, TensorRT, distributed training, and quantization in the same postings — a cluster that barely overlaps with the agents-and-RAG cluster. Decide which of the two you are before applying to either.

How many New York AI companies are hiring for GPUs?

As of November 14, 2026, 7 of the 47 New York AI companies we track name GPUs in the description of at least one open role, across 26 postings (12 based in New York). The count refreshes daily from the companies’ own job boards.

What do roles that ask for GPUs pay in New York?

Across 8 distinct posted salary ranges on New York roles naming GPUs, the median midpoint is $238k base, with the middle half between $215k and $250k. The same figure for all New York engineering postings is $215k. These are employer-posted ranges required by New York’s pay transparency law, base salary only.

Which skills are asked for alongside GPUs?

In the same postings, the terms most distinctively paired with GPUs are TensorRT, Triton, SGLang, CUDA, vLLM. We rank pairings by how much more often they appear together than apart, so near-universal terms such as Python do not crowd out the informative ones.

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