Opportunities
Our tracker counts cuts. This page follows the other direction: hiring plans, job postings, pay, and roles that barely existed three years ago. Every number here has a source and a date, same as the tracker.
Plan to hire, H2 2026
78%
+17 pts since January
Tech hiring managers adding permanent staff (Robert Half)
Software postings
74.4
+22% since May 2025 low
Indeed index, Feb 2020 = 100
Postings mentioning AI
6.3%
Of all US job ads · prior peak 3.3% in 2022
AI skills wage premium
56%
Same job titles, with vs without AI skills (PwC)
External figures, shown with their sources and retrieved 2026-09-10. Never mixed with our curated layoff totals. Bright spots last reviewed September 2026.
9numbers that point the other way from the layoff headlines. We've put the catch next to each one, because there usually is one.
78%
of tech hiring managers plan to add permanent staff in the second half of 2026
In Robert Half's mid-year survey, 78% of tech leaders said they'll grow permanent headcount before the year's out. In January it was 61%. Two thirds are also bringing in more contractors. Before you get excited, look at who they're after: mostly experienced specialists.
~8,000
people OpenAI wants on staff by the end of 2026, up from about 4,500
OpenAI told staff it wants to nearly double headcount by December, mostly in engineering, research, product and enterprise sales. Anthropic's open roles roughly doubled over the same year. Few of these are junior jobs, but the labs set the going rate for AI skills everywhere else.
65%
of tech hiring managers say skilled talent is harder to find than a year ago
Despite all the layoffs, two thirds of tech hiring managers told Robert Half that skilled people are harder to find than a year ago. The gaps they named: people who can roll out AI and automate work, enterprise platform skills, governance, and data tools like Kafka, Databricks and Azure.
+22%
more software developer job postings than at the May 2025 low
Indeed's index for software developer postings hit 74.4 in August (February 2020 is 100), up from 61.1 in May 2025. That's still about a quarter below where it was before the pandemic, and nowhere near the 2022 peak. But it's been going up the whole time the layoff headlines got louder.
+162K
US payroll jobs added in August 2026
August was the best month for US payrolls since March, and unemployment stayed at 4.1%. The information sector lost jobs in the same report, so tech itself isn't the story. The story is that banks, manufacturers, hospitals and government are doing fine, and they hire tech people too.
6.3%
of all US job postings now mention AI
6.3% of US job ads mentioned AI in August, against a previous high of 3.3% in 2022. Most of those aren't at AI labs. They're regular software, product, marketing and operations jobs that now list AI somewhere in the requirements.
#1
on LinkedIn's list of fastest-growing US job titles
LinkedIn's Jobs on the Rise list for 2026 put AI engineer at number one in the US, and postings for AI, machine learning and data science roles more than doubled between 2024 and 2025. Companies of every size are hiring for it now, not only the labs.
56%
higher pay for roles that ask for AI skills
PwC compared the same job titles with and without AI skills in the listing and found a 56% pay gap, up from 25% the year before. We've predicted this premium shrinks once everyone has the skill. So far we're wrong, and it's the biggest pay lever most tech workers have.
$134K+
bottom of the US starting range for an AI/ML engineer
Robert Half's 2026 salary guide has AI/ML engineers starting at $134,000 to $193,250, data engineers at $127,000 to $180,750 and cybersecurity engineers at $118,500 to $190,750. Generalist software pay has come down from 2022. Specialist pay mostly hasn't.
Eight kinds of work employers are paying for this year, why, and the skills that get you in the door. Where we have a full profile for the role, the card links to it.
Pretty much every company that cut staff in 2026 is also building AI features, and the people who can ship them are the hardest hires going.
Evidence: Fastest-growing US job title (LinkedIn); $134K to $193K starting range (Robert Half).
Full role outlook →
Most AI projects stall on messy data. Someone has to build the pipelines and warehouses first, and that's where the budget goes.
Evidence: Top-three in-demand role in Robert Half's 2026 survey; Kafka and Databricks named among the hardest skills to find.
Full role outlook →
Every new AI tool is one more thing to attack. Security hiring held up through every layoff wave since 2022.
Evidence: $118K to $191K starting range; cybersecurity engineer in the top four in-demand roles (Robert Half).
Full role outlook →
AI runs on infrastructure somebody has to build and keep running, and keeping the cloud bill down (FinOps) has become a job of its own.
Evidence: DevOps and network/cloud engineers both listed as in-demand for 2026; Azure among the hardest skills to fill.
Full role outlook →
The labs and their customers need people who can get a model working inside an actual business. Think half engineer, half consultant.
Evidence: A large share of OpenAI's and Anthropic's 2026 growth is in customer-facing engineering and enterprise roles.
Someone has to pick which work AI should take over, check whether it actually did, and retrain the team. Demand for general PMs is flat. This version is growing.
Evidence: 'AI adoption and automation workflows' is the number-one hardest-to-fill capability in Robert Half's 2026 survey.
Full role outlook →
The EU AI Act and nervous risk teams are creating compliance and testing jobs that didn't exist in 2023.
Evidence: Governance named among the hardest-to-fill capabilities; evals and AI-safety titles now appear across enterprise postings.
If you know finance, health, law, energy or manufacturing and you're good with AI, you're very hard to automate or offshore.
Evidence: Financial services and manufacturing were the strongest sectors for tech hiring in 2026 (Robert Half).
Most of this year's new postings are outside the big names. If you're only applying to the ten companies everyone's heard of, you're applying to the part of the market that's cutting.
See how your industry scoresFinancial services
The biggest tech hirer of 2026, per Robert Half. Banks and insurers are rebuilding old systems and buying a lot of AI.
Manufacturing and distribution
Right behind banks. Factories and logistics firms want automation, supply-chain software and people who can make sense of industrial data.
AI labs and AI infrastructure
OpenAI, Anthropic and the companies building data centers are adding people while most of big tech is shrinking.
Healthcare and health tech
People get sick whatever interest rates do. Health systems keep hiring for data, security and integration work.
Defense, aerospace and government
Budgets run for years, so hiring stays steady, and new AI rules mean more compliance jobs here, not fewer.
Startups and mid-market software
Most of the 2026 rebound in postings is here, not at the giants. Smaller teams, faster offers, and more of the work is built around AI from day one.
There is hiring, but it's picky. Employers want experienced specialists more than generalists or new grads. Banks and manufacturers are hiring more than the famous tech companies are. And people who build things with AI are doing better than people who just use it. Postings are still below the 2022 peak, and generalist pay has come down.
What we'd do. Find the role or sector on this page closest to where you are now, then use the skills roadmaps to get one step closer, and the role comparison to sanity-check the move before you spend a year on it.
Yes, and more than the headlines would have you think. In Robert Half's survey, 78% of technology leaders plan to add permanent headcount in the second half of 2026, up from 61% at the start of the year. Indeed's software-development postings index is 22% above its May 2025 low, and 6.3% of all US job ads now mention AI, nearly double the 2022 peak. The demand is lopsided, though. Experienced specialists in AI/ML, data, security and platform work are doing best. Financial services and manufacturing are hiring more than big tech, and startups and mid-market software companies more than the giants. So we'd describe the market as sorting people more than shrinking. Our Opportunities page tracks where it's growing, with sources.
Both, depending on where you're standing, so be wary of anyone who sums it up in one mood. On the bad side, 2026 layoffs have already passed 2025's total, entry-level hiring is still depressed, generalist pay has come down from the 2022 peak, and AI is now the reason companies cite most often for cuts. On the good side, software postings have been climbing for more than a year, hiring intent is the highest it's been since 2022, the wage premium for AI skills has widened to 56%, and the AI labs, banks, manufacturers and health systems are all hiring more people than they let go. If you're an experienced specialist who's comfortable with AI, you're in a seller's market. If you're junior or a generalist, you'll probably need to reposition, and that's what our skills pages and the resilience calculator are for.
The strongest demand is for building with AI: LLM integration, RAG, agents and evals. Using ChatGPT doesn't count. After that come the skills with steady premiums, which are security, cloud and platform engineering, and data engineering. Then there are the multipliers that make everything else worth more, like depth in a regulated industry, communication and stakeholder skills, and a public track record. Everything on that list does one of four things. It builds AI systems, secures them, feeds them data, or supplies the judgment they lack.