careerladder.fyi › Career paths › Hugging Face
How people got jobs at Hugging Face
What 50 people did before they joined Hugging Face: where they worked, what they studied, which role they came in through, and how long it took.
50
people in our data got there
88%
had a graduate degree first (of those listing one)
8
typical years since first job
- The most common step right before: from other companies (90%).
- The most common way in was Data science & ML (42% joined in that kind of role).
- Of those who list their education, 88% had a graduate degree before arriving and 24% a PhD.
- The typical person arrived about 8 years after their first job.
How Hugging Face compares
- 88% had a graduate degree, well above the 65% across other frontier AI labs, the highest of the 19 in our data.
- <1% came straight from Big Tech, well below the 19% across other frontier AI labs, the lowest of the 19 in our data.
- People arrived about 5 years earlier in their careers than at the typical one of the other frontier AI labs (8 vs 13 years since their first job).
Among people who list their education; places with at least 10 such people.
Show as a table
| People listing education | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Google DeepMind | 58 | 41% |
| World Labs | 39 | 33% |
| Physical Intelligence | 31 | 32% |
| Sakana AI | 41 | 29% |
| Cohere | 40 | 28% |
| Hugging Face (this page) | 34 | 24% |
| Stability AI | 40 | 22% |
| SpaceXAI | 17 | 18% |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 29 | 17% |
| OpenAI | 41 | 17% |
| Anthropic | 28 | 14% |
| Black Forest Labs | 32 | 12% |
| EleutherAI | 26 | 12% |
| Reflection | 20 | 10% |
| Mistral AI | 36 | 8% |
| Skild AI | 39 | 8% |
| Poolside | 31 | 6% |
| Cognition | 27 | 4% |
| Perplexity | 24 | <1% |
Show as a table
| Median years | ||
|---|---|---|
| SpaceXAI | 18 yrs | |
| Anthropic | 15 yrs | |
| Mistral AI | 15 yrs | |
| OpenAI | 14 yrs | |
| Perplexity | 14 yrs | |
| Reflection | 14 yrs | |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 14 yrs | |
| Stability AI | 14 yrs | |
| Poolside | 13 yrs | |
| Cognition | 13 yrs | |
| Cohere | 13 yrs | |
| Black Forest Labs | 10 yrs | |
| Physical Intelligence | 10 yrs | |
| Google DeepMind | 10 yrs | |
| Sakana AI | 9 yrs | |
| Skild AI | 9 yrs | |
| World Labs | 8 yrs | |
| Hugging Face (this page) | 8 yrs | |
| EleutherAI | 5 yrs |
Which role they joined in
Kinds of role with fewer than 5 people are combined into "All other roles".
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Data science & ML | 21 | 42% |
| All other roles | 23 | 46% |
| Business & operations | 6 | 12% |
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Machine Learning Engineer | 8 | 16% |
What they did right before
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| From other companies | 45 | 90% |
| Other | 5 | 10% |
Education
Among the 34 of 50 people who list their education.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Bachelor's | 4 | 12% |
| Master's | 21 | 62% |
| MBA | 1 | 3% |
| PhD | 8 | 24% |
How much experience they had
Among the 49 of 50 people with an earlier job listed.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| 3-5 years | 8 | 16% |
| 5-8 years | 15 | 31% |
| 8-12 years | 12 | 24% |
| 12+ years | 14 | 29% |
Where would your path lead?
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to Hugging Face, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to Hugging Face →
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to Hugging Face, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to Hugging Face →
Related
How these numbers are made. From 3k+ public career histories collected for careerladder.fyi (dated jobs, degrees and publications). The collection was built around particular employers, so people who reached well-known tech, AI and finance employers are over-represented: read shares as "among people in this dataset", not as hiring odds. Names are shown only when at least 5 people are behind them; smaller groups are combined into "Other". No individual profile is shown. Updated November 2026.