#73 Software Devs Job Market 2026 – where demand is growing & where it’s falling?

DanielJune 15, 2026July 23, 2026

It’s Daniel here, the author of 📘 Building Al Agents with LangGraph.js and currently working on 📙 Understanding Neural Networks from Scratch. 

Over the past few years, I’ve learned a lesson the hard way: don’t fight the market. In most cases, it’s better to be average in a great market than great in a dying market.

Yet how often do we stop to understand what’s actually happening in the market?

For this edition, I’m trying a different format for the newsletter. I bought the premium version of The Pragmatic Engineer’s SWE Job Market Report and printed all 80 pages. I spent a couple of hours highlighting, reviewing it, and pulled together the most actionable data:

· While the overall SWE market is on an upward trend, some specializations are taking a major hit. Roles such as Frontend, Mobile, and DevRel are in free fall. For example FE jobs are down 25%.

· Hiring mostly happens between March and June. Very few roles are added in the second half of the year. This was brand-new information for me. Companies set annual headcount targets at the beginning of the year, and hiring budgets are usually spent by mid-year.

· In Big Tech, Apple and Google seem to be the most stable places when it comes to SWE roles. Apple has not made massive layoffs in decades. In contrast, Meta is the most volatile place to work.

· The fastest-growing companies are in fintech and security.

· Observability companies are doing great. AI agents are driving demand for observability. In addition, all companies are producing more code. AI-generated code is likely to have bugs, and the best way to know if there are issues is to monitor code in production. AI labs are major clients, with OpenAI spending $170 million on Datadog logs in 2025.

· Search infrastructure companies are also benefiting from the AI boom. Many AI use cases involve searching large datasets using techniques such as RAG. Elasticsearch and other search providers are updating their offerings to support AI search and vector databases. Naturally, they are also hiring many AI Engineers.

· Job openings for AI Engineers increased by a whopping 60%, and this trend applies to Big Tech roles as well. Compensation for AI Engineers is rising too.

· The most popular tech stacks for AI Engineer roles include Python, PyTorch, Google Cloud (or Azure or AWS), TensorFlow, and Kubernetes. Understanding RAG is now a baseline expectation. By the way, X from LangChain has a really good video on this topic.

· The country and city you are based in matter a lot. While the US and UK markets are up 20%, France and Germany are down 15%. Remote jobs are down as well.

· It reminds me of what Scott Galloway was saying in this video about why you need to be in the right place. Cities such as Seattle have more available jobs than the entire UK market. It’s another version of “better to be average in a great market than great in a dying market.”

· Overall, the conclusion is clear: the best place to be today is as an AI Engineer in the US market. The toughest market is Frontend, Mobile, or DevRel in the EU. We’re not talking about a 10% difference, but a 10x difference. Choosing the right market is often more important than competing harder within the wrong one.

· Seeing the rise of AI Engineer jobs, I think the book I’m working on – 📙 Neural networks from Scratch – comes at exactly the right moment. Understanding the fundamentals of how these AI models are trained and how they work under the hood is like mastering HTTP for web development or Assembly language for programming. It’s timeless knowledge that will remain useful for decades to come.

What is your opinion of this deep-dive format? Do you like it more than the previous format, where I shared news and tips across a variety of topics?

I’m thinking about doing an in-depth deep dive into the AI Engineer tech stack and projects, or perhaps tech book reviews. Just reply “yes” if you’d find that interesting, suggest another topic, or let me know if you prefer the older format.