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👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a subscriber-only issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
Tech jobs market 2025, part 3: job seekers’ stories
Details on the state of hiring from software engineers and EMs in the market for a new job. Insights on what’s happening from recruitment platforms: junior rebound, picky employers & a tough market
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“What is the state of the tech jobs market in 2025?” is the question this article tackles in the third and final part of our mini-series on that major subject. We hear from job platforms, and from tech professionals searching for their next opportunity. This article features Wellfound (a jobs platform with around 6M software engineering profiles), and data from Revealera, an alternative data platform. There are also more than 30 software engineers and engineering leaders who discussed their job hunting experience with me. Today, we cover:
Job platform data. Falling demand for remote work, more “barriers” put up by companies, slightly higher demand for backend engineers than before, and more.
Junior engineer recruitment rebounds? More scaleups and publicly traded tech companies are doubling down on hiring new grads and early-career engineers.
Picky employers. More hiring managers hold out for the “perfect candidate,” more rejections come with no feedback, and some think the candidate quality is down, overall. Referrals seem like the only way to consistently get interviews.
Software engineer archetypes in and out of demand. AI engineers, those with Big Tech experience, and infra+SRE engineers are in demand. Times are reportedly tougher for candidates who took career breaks, are self-taught, or are native mobile engineers.
State of engineering leadership hiring. It’s very tough everywhere, especially for experienced engineering managers not yet at Director level. One executive recruiter says many leadership candidates have poor AI skills and unrealistic pay expectations.
Remote market. It’s harder to land a job and compensation is lower, but the bar is higher for remote positions.
Regional observations. Outside of cities, the market is tougher: in Germany, Wayfair’s exit could drag down pay. Are Swiss companies looking to hire in cheaper EU countries?
Previous articles in this series covered:
What the data says (Part 1). Rising AI engineering demand, more Big Tech hiring, and the growing importance of location.
What hiring managers see (Part 2). A flood of inbound applications, higher demand for Product Engineers, and a challenge to find “top” candidates.
As usual, I have no affiliation with vendors mentioned in this article, and have not been paid to write about them. More in my ethics statement.
The bottom of this article could be cut off in some email clients. Read the full article uninterrupted, online.
1. Job platform data
In Part 2 of this mini-series, we covered how some hiring managers are shifting to recruit on sites like Wellfound (formerly: Angellist Talent) because LinkedIn has gotten too noisy for finding candidates efficiently.
Wellfound has 12M active candidates on its site, of which circa 50% are software engineers. More than 27,000 companies use the site for recruitment, with more than 100,000 hires made, to date. As a jobs marketplace, Wellfound does not filter. Its CEO Amit Matani has shared the trends they see, right now:
According to Wellfound’s data, the job market was most competitive in January 2025, when applications per job peaked on the site. Today, the number is down 10% from that height – meaning it’s now slightly easier to stand out as a candidate. Even so, the job market is very tough compared to 2021:
6x as many applicants per remote job
5x as many applicants per in-person job
There’s a big rise in AI engineering job ads. Overall, this is the most visible trend on the platform, and it matches trends covered in Part 1 of this mini-series. For advice on getting into AI Engineering, check out the deepdives, AI Engineering in the real world and The AI Engineering stack.
What makes an in-demand candidate?
I asked Amit about profiles of candidates which are most popular with employers, meaning types of folks whom companies reach out to the most. He revealed:
AI product engineers. Those who can build AI products end-to-end (fullstack + LLMs + evals + RAG).
Data engineers and backend engineers. Visibly rising demand for these.
AI-native engineers: Engineers who are experts in how to use AI tools to significantly boost productivity.
Pedigree means up to 50x more reachouts. Profiles with high-profile schools and workplaces get up to 20-50x more reachouts than similar profiles with not as much “pedigree”. This is not unique to software engineering, says Amit, nor to 2025.
In-person much more in demand. Most hiring is by companies headquartered in US metropolitan centers, and engineers in such areas get many more reachouts than candidates who work full-remote.
The San Francisco Bay Area has the most job postings – not even a contest. Overall, Wellfound finds the highest density of job ads in the US and India.
Remote: falling demand, but many roles are open to it
On remote job trends, Amit shares:
“35% of engineering jobs are open to remote candidates. This is down from a peak of 56% in 2022. However, remote engineering jobs get 4.5x as many applications compare