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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.
State of the software engineering job market in 2026
A deepdive into today’s tech jobs market, with exclusive data on software engineering jobs, the AI engineering boom, whether AI engineering is “replacing” software engineering hiring, and more
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Last year, I described the tech jobs market as “weird”, based on reports from both job seekers and hiring managers. In this deepdive, we dig into what – if anything – has changed in 2026.
A year ago, most engineers found it harder to get responses to job applications, while hiring managers found it harder to hire than before. We’ve now spent two months gathering fresh, never-before-shared data from a range of sources to find out if that paradoxical situation still exists or not.
We collected the data with software engineer Jessica Salmon – who’s joined the team as a tech industry analyst. A big thank you to partner teams who shared exclusive details for this deepdive:
TrueUp: a platform that scans every open job in Big Tech, top startups, and scaleups, typically paying in the top two tiers of the trimodal software engineering compensation model. Thanks, Amit Taylor.
Workforce.ai, built by Live Data Technologies, which monitors 1M+ job changes and 300M+ employment validations each month across companies, roles, levels, functions, industries, and locations. Special thanks to Alex Hamilton for his input.
Today, we cover:
Software engineering recruitment: trending up, mostly. More software engineering job postings in the UK and the US, and a decline in Germany and France. “Top” tech companies are hiring 20% more vs a year ago.
Big Tech and publicly-traded companies. Meta went on a monster hiring spree for the last two years until layoffs, last week. Microsoft and Amazon were flat, while Google and Apple consistently hired devs. Stripe, Shopify, and Atlassian all hired more than Big Tech.
Who’s hiring the most software engineers? Apple, Amazon, and IBM are the top 3 by number of positions listed, while Meta dropped off the top 20 with layoffs there. The fastest-growing companies seem to be in fintech, observability, and security.
AI engineering: explosive demand. Most tech companies seem to be prioritizing AI engineering recruitment over software engineers. Observability companies appear to be hiring fastest.
Who’s hiring the most AI engineers? Apple, Google, and TikTok have the most openings, and many larger tech companies have 50-100% more AI engineering job listings than a year ago.
Is AI engineering replacing software engineering hiring? The data doesn’t say, but are the basics of AI engineering becoming a baseline skill for software engineering job candidates?
For more on the tech jobs market of 2025, check out last year’s deepdive.
The bottom of this article could be cut off in some email clients. Read the full article uninterrupted, online.
1. Software engineering recruitment: trending up, mostly
Top tech companies hiring more, slowly but surely
TrueUp tracks open positions at top-paying companies, which are usually US-based. Among this group, recruitment of software engineers has been steadily increasing since March 2023:
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US growth, but less in Canada and Europe
Let’s take a look at broader industry trends via software developer jobs listed on Indeed.com, the world’s largest job aggregator site. As a “jobs aggregator”, Indeed not only displays paid-for ads but also crawls many other career sites and lists the vacancies.
Looking at trends over the last five years, the number of software engineering jobs listed is still lower than in May 202