Three questions to ask an AI-rated job board (and the exact queries that answer them)
Job boards answer "who is hiring" well and "what is the job, really" badly. Every AI job board we published on worked around that with a free read-only interface: Level exposes its catalog through a REST API and an MCP server, no key required. Here are the three questions worth asking first, with the queries and the numbers as of 22 September 2026.
1. Who is building AI, rather than using it?
The catalog rates every posting from Level 1 to Level 4 on how central AI is to the work, scored from the posting text alone:
| Level | Score | Meaning | Live jobs (22 Sept 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 80-100 | Build AI systems | 3,539 |
| 3 | 60-79 | Work with AI | 6,574 |
| 2 | 40-59 | Use AI as a tool | 3,275 |
| 1 | 0-39 | Work around AI | 34,347 |
Query the top of the scale:
curl "https://jobsbylevel.com/api/v1/jobs?ai_level_min=4"
The interesting result is the shape, not the list: Level 4 is 3,539 of 47,735 tracked postings — about 7%. If your sourcing strategy assumes every company with "AI" in its pitch is hiring AI builders, this is the correction.
2. Which companies hire AI builders most consistently?
Sorting companies by the average AI score of their open roles is a better signal than headcount, because it does not reward a company for posting fifty Level 1 roles. Two MCP tools answer this directly: market_stats for the live distribution by AI level, remote share and top tools, and list_ai_native_companies for companies ranked by the average AI score of their open roles.
claude mcp add --transport http level-jobs https://jobsbylevel.com/mcp
Then ask the assistant the question instead of writing the aggregation yourself. On the REST side, /api/v1/jobs filters by company, so a single company can be checked without the ranking tool.
3. Is remote real in AI roles, or is it a filter that hides the work?
Remote flags on job boards are self-reported by the posting. Cross the flag with the AI level to see where remote actually concentrates:
curl "https://jobsbylevel.com/api/v1/jobs?ai_level_min=3&remote=1"
Then run the same query without remote=1, and once more with ai_level_max=2, and compare the counts. If remote only concentrates at Level 1 and 2, the roles you want are on-site more often than a remote-first filter suggests. The same comparison is available as a single market_stats call, which reports the remote share directly.
Two caveats worth repeating
- Text, not reality. The level reflects what the posting says. Where a description avoids AI entirely, the score says AI is absent from the description — which is weaker than saying it is absent from the job.
- Counts move. Postings are pulled from company applicant tracking systems every six hours, and a posting whose text changes is scored again. Re-run a query before quoting a number.
Keeping the link
Results carry a canonical jobsbylevel.com/jobs/<slug> URL — keep that link when you show results. Fair use sits around 60 requests per minute per IP, and the endpoints are read-only by design.
Full method: jobsbylevel.com/method · Level definitions: jobsbylevel.com/levels · Level is a free, AI-rated job board for people who want to know what the job really is.
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