2026 Tech Hiring Report: PM Roles Are Rising, Engineering Hiring Is Only Half of 2022

Lenny Rachitsky published the fifth tech hiring market report in November 2026. The data comes from TrueUp and Live Data Technologies: the former tracks global open roles at more than 9,000 tech companies, while the latter tracks U.S. hiring, attrition, and promotion changes among 124 million professionals. The original report is here, and the summary post on X is here.

Start with the most counterintuitive point. There has been a lot of discussion over the past two years about AI replacing PMs, but the data has so far moved in the opposite direction. Open PM roles are higher than at any point in nearly four years, up 75% from the March 2023 low. Since early 2023, open PM roles are up 56%, while engineering roles are up 43%. At a more granular level, PM's share of hiring has risen from 16% in 2021 to 21% today, the only one of the five core roles whose share has increased.

But Lenny also notes that more open roles does not equal a hot hiring market. Actual PM hiring has been flat or declining in recent years. The demand is there; finding the right PM is harder. In the comments, someone asked who exactly these new PM roles are going to, which domains they come from, and what experience level they require. The report does not answer that layer.

Engineering roles are another signal. Growth in open engineering roles has fallen from 29% in 2024 and 15% in 2025 to 2.5% over the past year. Tech companies today have fewer open engineering roles than in March 2026. The U.S. hired about 113,000 software engineers over the past 12 months, less than half of the 239,000 peak in 2022. Hiring data has declined year by year since 2022.

There are two bright spots. Tech recruiting roles themselves are surging: open recruiter roles are up nearly 300% from mid-2023, possibly a leading indicator that engineering hiring could reaccelerate. The other is FDE, or forward deployed engineer. Global open FDE roles have grown 4.6x over the past year and currently number about 1,500. Lenny also acknowledges that some of these may be roles such as sales engineer renamed as FDE. In the comments, someone asked whether FDE is a new market or a renaming of solution architect.

Engineering itself is also bifurcating. Security engineering is one of the fastest-growing areas, behind FDE. Demand for mobile and front-end engineers has nearly halved over the past year. Lenny's explanation is that specialized silos are collapsing and AI lets small teams own broader areas.

The design numbers are even colder. There are about 1,900 open product design roles globally, down 28% from a year ago and the lowest since tracking began. The U.S. hired about 12,600 product designers over the past 12 months, versus 27,600 in the same period in 2022. The ratio of open PM roles to open design roles has risen to 3.8 to 1, up from 2.6 to 1 earlier this year and 1.9 to 1 in early 2023. There are about 1,900 open design roles, roughly the same order of magnitude as the 1,500 FDE roles, and that comparison is striking. Someone asked why design demand is not rising. Lenny's answer is hidden in another number: user research has been hit even harder.

The U.S. hired only about 1,800 user researchers over the past year, down 66% from 5,300 in 2022, the largest decline among all roles. So far in 2026, only Google has hired more than 50 user researchers. There are only 108 open UXR roles globally. As product development cycles speed up, traditional user research processes are being compressed, and tools like Listen Labs and Simile let non-research roles run research themselves. UXR as a standalone function is being squeezed.

Changes in the skills section are more direct than job titles. Two years ago, the most common terms in PM job descriptions were SQL, Jira, AWS, and Python. Today LLM is the most frequently occurring skill in PM job descriptions. Claude ranks third; Cursor, OpenAI, and MCP have entered the top eight; evals has entered the top ten. On the engineering side, Python has been No. 1 for years and was still accelerating in early 2025. LLM has just overtaken Java, Java has been declining over the past year, and Kubernetes remains durable. On the design side, demand for Figma has continued to rise over the past three years, but Claude became the second most mentioned skill in designer job descriptions this spring, overtaking CSS, and Cursor has also surpassed CSS.

Location and work mode are also flipping. The Bay Area now accounts for 15% of all open tech roles, up 43% from a year ago. One in four PM and design roles is in the Bay Area, and one in five engineering roles is. All three ratios are near or at record highs, nearly double 2022 levels. Remote roles account for 14% of all open tech roles, a record low, down from 21% at the end of 2022. Remote engineering roles have fallen from 25% to 14%, design from 34% to 19%, and PM has held steady at about 21%. Last year brought a milestone: the number of PM, engineering, and design roles in the Bay Area is now greater than the number of global remote roles. Four years ago, remote roles still led by nearly 2 to 1.

In the comments, some people were unhappy about the remote share, saying many talented people cannot relocate. Others noted that cybersecurity engineers will not easily be replaced in the era of data security. Another comment compressed the report into one sentence: the bottleneck has shifted from writing code to writing specs. That may not cover every role, but it explains why PM roles are rising, why design roles are falling, and why customer-facing implementation roles like FDE are heating up. The report's final conclusion is that the tech hiring market is growing overall, but the growth is mainly happening outside software roles. The full argument is behind a paywall, and I will not fill it in here.

Data will not make career choices for people, but it can dismantle some popular narratives. The 2026 tech hiring market, at least for now, has not followed the most easily spread script.