Lenny Rachitsky has published “State of the tech job market: late 2026,” the fifth of his twice-yearly reports on hiring and job openings. Using openings data from TrueUp, which he says tracks more than 9,000 tech companies and powers Lenny’s Jobs, and hiring data from Live Data Technologies, which he says covers job changes for 124 million professionals in the US, he finds product-manager openings at a multi-year high, engineering openings stalled, and design roles at a record low.
Product, engineering and design
Rachitsky says there are more open product-manager roles than at any point in nearly four years, up 75% from a March 2023 low, and that PM openings have grown faster than any other core tech role since the start of 2023 (56%, compared with 43% for engineering). Live Data’s US hiring figures, as he reports them, show hiring for every core product role flat or down in recent years, with PM holding up best. PM’s share of hiring among five core roles rose from 16% in 2021 to 21% now. He reads the gap between rising openings and flat hiring as a sign that demand for PMs is growing, and that filling those roles is getting harder.
For the first time in this series, he says, engineering openings have stalled. They grew 29% through 2024, 15% through 2025, and 2.5% in the past year, and there are fewer open engineering roles at tech companies now than there were in March. US companies hired about 113,000 software engineers from May 2025 to April 2026, less than half the 2022 peak of 239,000, and the annual figure has fallen every year since 2022. He still counts engineering as the largest hiring category, with more than 120,000 US hires in 2025 and more than 65,000 open engineering jobs. Openings are up 44% since January 2024, while actual hiring is down 17%.
Two other engineering notes stand out in the public report. Open recruiter roles are at a record high, up nearly 300% since mid-2023, which he treats as a possible leading indicator of faster engineering hiring. Forward deployed engineer (FDE) openings, historically a few dozen roles and mostly at Palantir, have climbed to about 1,500 and are up 4.6 times in the past year. He says that may mix real demand with other titles, such as sales engineer, being relabelled as FDE. Security engineering is among the fastest-growing specialties after FDEs, while demand for mobile and front-end engineers has almost halved in the past year.
Design openings are at the lowest point since he started tracking them: about 1,900 open product design roles at tech companies globally, down 28% from a year ago. US firms hired about 12,600 product designers in the past 12 months, less than half the 27,600 hired in 2022, and hiring has fallen every year since. There are now 3.8 open PM roles for every open design role, up from 2.6 earlier this year and 1.9 in early 2023. Live Data shows US employers hired about 2.9 PMs for every designer in the past 12 months, up from 1.9 in 2022.
User research has fallen further. About 1,800 user researchers were hired in the US over the past year, down 66% from 5,300 in 2022, and hiring fell another 22% from the year before. Rachitsky says Meta and Google together made about one in eight of all US user-research hires in 2025, and that so far in 2026 Google is the only company to have hired 50 or more. There are 108 open user-research jobs at tech companies globally, according to the report.
AI skills, the Bay Area and remote work
In product-manager job descriptions, he says, “LLM” is now the most mentioned skill, ahead of terms that led two years ago, such as SQL, Jira, AWS and Python. “Claude” is third, and Cursor, OpenAI and MCP are in the top eight, with “evals” in the top 10. For engineers, Python remains the most mentioned skill, and “LLM” has just passed Java. For designers, Figma is still the most mentioned skill and has grown over the past three years. “Claude” became the second most mentioned skill in designer job descriptions this spring, ahead of CSS, and Cursor has also moved ahead of CSS. Rachitsky writes that “it’s notable that it’s Claude specifically, vs. ‘LLM’ or ChatGPT,” and that “Anthropic seems to be winning the hearts and minds of designers.”
A record 15% of open roles at tech companies, about one in seven, are now based in the Bay Area, and the number of open jobs there is up 43% from a year ago. One in four open PM and design roles, and one in five engineering roles, are in the Bay Area. He says all three shares are at record highs and have nearly doubled since 2022.
Just 14% of open tech roles now offer a remote option, the lowest in his data, down from 21% in late 2022. Remote engineering roles are also at a record low, at 14%, down from 25% in late 2022. Design is at 19%, down from 34%. PM has held at about 21% for the past two years, still near a record low. Sometime last year, he says, open PM, engineering and design roles based in the Bay Area overtook remote roles in those functions globally.
Rachitsky’s seventh takeaway, stated in the public summary, is that the tech job market is growing fast, but mostly outside software. The supporting figures for that point are in the paid section of the report.
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