Lenny Rachitsky has published his State of the tech job market: late 2026 report (10 November), his fifth and — by his own reckoning — his most surprising, drawing on openings data from TrueUp across more than 9,000 tech companies and US hiring flows from Live Data Technologies, which tracks 124 million professionals. Its subtitle inverts the usual AI-takes-the-jobs framing: “PMs are winning, engineers are plateauing, designers are hurting, and the biggest AI hiring boom isn’t in software.”
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE: The AI era has reshuffled tech’s internal hierarchy rather than hollowing it out. Product manager openings sit at a four-year high, up 75 percent from the March 2023 low, and PM is the only core role gaining share of hiring. Engineering demand has stalled — hiring is below half its 2022 peak — while design and user research have contracted hardest. AI skills like LLM and Claude now appear in a meaningful slice of job descriptions. For job seekers the map of opportunity has moved: toward AI-adjacent roles, away from remote, and — per the paywalled takeaway — largely outside traditional software.
PMs win, engineers plateau, design sinks
The most counter-intuitive number in the report concerns product managers — a role widely predicted to be squeezed by AI-generated specs and prototypes. Instead, open PM roles stand at 7,303, “more than at any point in nearly four years”, up 75 percent from the 2023 low, and PM openings have grown faster (+56 percent since January 2023) than engineering (+43 percent). PM hiring has held up best of the five core roles, and PM’s share of US hiring across the tracked roles rose from 16 percent in 2021 to 21 percent. Rachitsky’s reading: demand is strong, and “landing great PMs is getting harder.”
Engineering tells the plateau story. Open roles grew 29 percent through 2024, 15 percent through 2025, and just 2.5 percent in the past year — the first stall in the report’s history. US companies hired about 113,000 software engineers in the 12 months to April 2026, against a 2022 peak of 239,000. But the averages hide a violent reshuffle underneath: forward-deployed engineer openings rose 361 percent over the year, security 34 percent and platform 30 percent, while mobile fell 39 percent, iOS 46 percent, Android 47 percent and front-end 51 percent. Recruiters themselves are being hired again — open recruiter roles up 295 percent from their 2023 low — which Rachitsky reads as a possible leading indicator of engineering hiring reaccelerating, not dying.
Design is the squeezed role: open product design positions at a record low of 1,924, down 28 percent on the year, with 3.8 open PM roles for every open design role. User research openings are down 55 percent since 2023.
The AI skill signatures in job ads
The report’s AI signal shows up most concretely in what employers now ask for. LLM is the most-named skill in PM job descriptions (11 percent), and Claude appears in 5 percent; among engineers, Python still leads at 29 percent with LLM at 12 percent and Claude 6 percent; even designers’ ads now name Claude (13 percent) behind Figma. The share is small enough to keep honest — in most ads AI skills still go unmentioned — but the direction is one-way, and it gives job seekers a concrete, checkable signal of which employers are rebuilding around AI.
Two structural shifts frame the opportunities: the AI-hiring boom is concentrating geographically (the San Francisco Bay Area now holds a record 14.9 percent of open tech roles, passing remote for the first time), and remote has fallen to a record-low 14.4 percent of open roles, from about 21 percent in late 2022. The report’s seventh takeaway — that the tech job market’s fastest growth is “mostly outside of software” — sits behind the paywall, but that headline alone reframes the industry’s trajectory: the market is growing, just not in the places the last decade’s graduates aimed at.
The honest caveats
The report counts openings and hires; it does not measure causes, and where it links changes to AI, Rachitsky flags those as his own reading rather than findings — so the “PMs are winning because of AI” causal story should be held loosely. The two datasets also count different markets: TrueUp’s openings cover tech companies worldwide, while Live Data’s hiring flows cover US professionals at employers in any sector, which is one reason opening counts and hiring counts can point different directions. Recent hiring charts are labelled as still being recorded, and independent walkthroughs of the free portion — such as CellCog’s analysis — note some chart figures differ slightly between sections. None of that undermines the direction of travel, but every specific figure deserves the hedge it arrives with.
What this means for New Zealand career watchers
NZ’s tech market is small enough that US composition shifts arrive as supply-demand weather rather than headline news, but the transferable signals are concrete. The rise of the forward-deployed engineer — an engineer embedded with customers rather than in a product silo — mirrors the AI-adjacent, client-facing roles PwC’s NZ AI Barometer found growing here, and matches what we saw when Live Data Technologies data showed tech job openings climbing rather than collapsing earlier this quarter. For students and career switchers, the report’s practical read is that the safest AI-era bets so far are judgement-plus-communication roles — PM, customer-facing engineering, security — rather than either pure code production or the analytics specialisations being absorbed first. For NZ employers competing for scarce senior talent, the shrinking remote share is the unwelcome one: if US firms are pulling people back on-site, NZ’s remote-first access to the global talent market narrows with it.
❓ FAQ
Are product manager jobs growing in 2026? Openings are: 7,303 open PM roles at tech companies per TrueUp data in the report, up 75 percent from the March 2023 low — a near four-year high. US PM hiring is 4 percent below its January 2024 level, the smallest decline of the five core roles tracked.
Is software engineering dying because of AI? The report shows a plateau, not a collapse: 65,351 open engineering roles, though annual hiring (about 113,000 engineers in the year to April 2026) sits below half the 2022 peak of 239,000. Specialties diverge sharply — AI-adjacent roles up hundreds of percent, front-end and mobile down sharply.
What skills do AI-era tech job ads name? Per the report: LLM leads PM ads at 11 percent, Python leads engineering ads at 29 percent with LLM at 12 percent, and Claude appears in 13 percent of design ads. Most ads still name no AI tool at all, so the shares describe a direction rather than a requirement.
Why is remote work shrinking if AI enables distributed teams? The report records remote at a record-low 14.4 percent of open tech roles, down from about 21 percent in late 2022, without assigning a cause; the same period saw AI-era hiring concentrate in the Bay Area. Whatever the driver, job seekers hoping to work remotely from New Zealand face a shrinking share of the market.
📰 Sources
- Lenny Rachitsky — State of the tech job market: late 2026 (10 November 2026)
- Live Data Technologies — See who’s hiring in tech in 2026
- CellCog — Tech Job Market Late 2026: What Lenny’s Report Shows (11 November 2026)
- TrueUp — openings dataset named in the report
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
