What happened
In a report published November 10, 2026, Lenny Rachitsky says he combined two datasets: TrueUp, which tracks global job openings at more than 9,000 technology companies, and Live Data Technologies, which tracks job changes for 124 million professionals. The hiring figures cited from Live Data Technologies are specifically for the United States. Rachitsky presents the datasets together as a way to compare advertised openings with actual hiring, while noting that differences between them can be revealing.
The report says engineering openings grew 29% through 2024 and 15% through 2025, but only 2.5% in the latest year. It also says there were fewer open engineering roles at technology companies than in March. Live Data Technologies figures put US software-engineer hiring at about 113,000 over the 12 months from May 2025 through April 2026, less than half the 2022 peak of 239,000. Rachitsky contrasts openings and hiring: engineering openings are up 44% since January 2024, while hiring is down 17% over that period.
The report identifies different movements within engineering. Forward-deployed-engineer openings have risen 4.6 times in the past year, to around 1,500 globally, though Rachitsky cautions that some of the increase may reflect existing sales-engineer roles being relabelled. Security engineering is also described as a fast-growing specialty. By contrast, demand for mobile and front-end engineers has nearly halved over the year. The report’s interpretation is that smaller teams may be taking broader ownership, potentially with AI contributing to that shift; this is an interpretation, not a demonstrated causal result.
Product-management openings are reported at their highest level in nearly four years, 75% above the March 2023 low. Since the start of 2023, PM openings rose 56%, compared with 43% for engineering. Yet the report says actual hiring across core product roles has been flat or declining; PMs are the exception in share of hiring, rising from 16% in 2021 to 21% today. Design is weaker: there are about 1,900 open product-design roles globally, down 28% year over year, while US product-designer hiring was about 12,600 over the latest 12 months, less than half the 2022 figure. User-research hiring in the US fell 66% from 2022 to about 1,800 over the latest year.
The report also tracks skills and location. “LLM” is the most-mentioned skill in PM job descriptions, with Claude third and Cursor, OpenAI, and MCP among the top eight. For engineers, LLM has passed Java in job postings, while Python remains the most-mentioned skill. The share of tech openings offering remote work is 14%, compared with 21% in late 2022; the Bay Area accounts for 15% of open tech roles. These are descriptive findings from the datasets, not forecasts of individual companies’ hiring plans.
What the archive adds
We have not covered this before; it opens a new thread.
Trend signal
This does not yet fit a pattern New Runtime tracks. The report describes changes in hiring and job requirements, but does not establish a shift in how organizations structure work around reviewing or orchestrating agent output.
Why now
The report compares recent job openings with hiring across the latest available periods, including US hiring from May 2025 through April 2026. Its timing matters because it puts the slowing growth of engineering openings alongside the increased appearance of AI terms in job descriptions, rather than treating AI adoption and hiring as separate conversations.
Why it matters
For teams building with AI, the report is a reminder not to equate more AI work with more hiring across every technical specialty. The figures point to a market where general engineering remains the largest hiring category, but openings have flattened; meanwhile, mobile and front-end demand has fallen sharply and security and forward-deployed roles have gained attention. These shifts may affect where a team can recruit and which responsibilities need to be combined, but the report does not prove that AI caused them.
The skills data is more directly useful for workforce planning: AI-related terms appear in PM and engineering job descriptions, alongside durable skills such as Python and SQL. Teams can use that as a reason to make AI fluency explicit in role definitions, while retaining domain expertise and evaluation skills rather than treating familiarity with a named model as a substitute. The gap between advertised openings and actual hiring also argues against reading job-board totals as a direct measure of realized demand. Hiring plans should be checked against their own recruiting funnel and workload, not inferred from market-wide openings alone.
Limits and uncertainty
The report relies on proprietary datasets and does not provide an independent audit of their classifications or coverage. Job openings and completed hires measure different things, and neither directly shows whether AI caused a role to grow or shrink. Rachitsky explicitly notes that some forward-deployed-engineer growth may come from job-title relabelling. The figures also combine global openings with US hiring in places, so they should not be treated as directly interchangeable. The report describes market-level patterns; it cannot predict an individual employer’s hiring needs or a worker’s prospects.
Skill to build now
If you are defining roles for an AI-building team, compare your recent job descriptions with the tasks people actually perform. Identify where AI fluency, software fundamentals, security, and customer-facing implementation are required, then make those expectations explicit. Track applicants, interviews, and hires separately: the report’s distinction between openings and realized hiring shows why one aggregate number can mislead.
Reader takeaway
The headline is not that AI has replaced one engineering specialty. It is that the market is moving unevenly: engineering openings have stalled, some specialties are gaining while others contract, and AI skills are becoming more visible in job descriptions. Treat the numbers as a planning signal, not proof of causation or a forecast for your organization.