It’s been 12 months since I rejoined Techifide and I thought it would be interesting to write down some of my observations about the market, the lessons learned and what we are seeing happening inside the technology sector.
Because of what we do at Techifide, I find myself in a privileged position where I can observe the market from three completely different perspectives at the same time. We work closely with companies trying to hire talent, with engineers looking for new opportunities and, naturally, from the recruitment side itself, where we spend every day trying to make sense of the enormous amount of change, uncertainty and hype currently surrounding technology and AI.
That combination gives us a very honest and practical view of the market. We are not analysing trends from a distance. We are living them daily through conversations with founders, CTOs, hiring managers and software engineers across multiple countries.
Before writing this article, I also spent some time researching hiring trends from the last 24 months. I analysed data from sources such as CompTIA, LinkedIn Economic Graph, Indeed Hiring Lab, and Eurostat to better understand whether what we were experiencing at Techifide matched the broader market data.
The conclusion was very interesting because, despite all the noise online suggesting that AI is replacing software engineers, the data shows something quite different.
Tech Hiring Is Increasing
From May 2024 to April 2026, IT job postings increased by 57.6%.
That is not what you would expect if engineering jobs were disappearing.
What we are actually seeing is not a reduction in demand for engineers, but a transformation in the type of engineer companies are looking for. The market is becoming more selective and significantly more demanding, especially at the junior level.
One thing I had already started noticing over the past year was that almost all of our partners were asking for mid-level and senior engineers. Very few companies were looking for junior developers compared to previous years. The research confirmed this impression. There has been a measurable decline in demand for junior engineers and, while the reduction is not catastrophic, it is certainly real.
In my opinion, the explanation is relatively straightforward. AI is already capable of handling a large portion of the repetitive and lower-complexity work that junior developers traditionally performed. Tasks that previously required several hours of manual implementation can now often be accelerated significantly with AI-assisted development tools.
As a result, the barrier to entry into software engineering is becoming higher.
Companies still want junior engineers, but they now expect them to arrive with stronger fundamentals, better communication skills and a much greater ability to learn independently. Increasingly, they are also expecting candidates to understand how to work alongside AI tools from the beginning of their careers.
At the same time, the demand for experienced engineers remains extremely strong.
One of the most common requests we hear from clients today is not simply that they want good developers, but that they want engineers who know how to use AI productively and responsibly. Companies are not necessarily trying to replace engineers with AI. The businesses moving fastest are usually the ones using AI to amplify the productivity of strong engineering teams.
There is a huge difference between replacing engineers and empowering engineers.
The engineers standing out in today’s market are the ones who can combine technical depth, good judgement and AI-assisted workflows effectively. Companies increasingly value professionals who understand architecture, scalability, security, infrastructure and long-term maintainability, because these are areas where human decision-making still matters enormously.
This is probably one of the biggest shifts currently happening in the industry.
For many years, experience alone carried a lot of weight in technology hiring. Today, however, companies are becoming much more interested in judgement and technical maturity than simply the number of years someone has been coding.
- Can the engineer review AI-generated code properly?
- Can they identify security risks?
- Can they make architectural decisions?
- Can they understand trade-offs?
- Can they maintain complex systems at scale?
These are the questions companies are increasingly paying for.
The role of a senior engineer is evolving from someone who primarily writes code into someone who oversees systems, validates decisions, guides technical direction and acts as a safeguard against poor implementation choices generated at scale by AI-assisted tooling.
This change is also heavily reflected in salary growth.
The relationship between salary growth and seniority is becoming increasingly disproportionate. Junior salaries are still increasing, but at a relatively modest pace. Senior salaries, on the other hand, are growing aggressively in areas such as AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, distributed systems, MLOps and platform engineering.
The market is placing a significant premium on engineers capable of managing complexity and reducing risk.
Some highly specialised senior positions are seeing salary growth levels that would have sounded unrealistic only a few years ago. Meanwhile, more traditional development roles that have not adapted to AI-assisted workflows are beginning to stagnate in terms of compensation growth.
| Growth | ||||
| Seniority | USA | Europe | Global Avg. | 2026 Salary Range (Avg) |
| Junior | 3.5% – 5.5% | 2.0% – 4.0% | 4.2% | $75k – $115k £35k – £55k |
| Mid-Level | 8.0% – 12.0% | 6.5% – 9.0% | 9.4% | $125k – $185k £65k – £95k |
| Senior+ | 15.0% – 22.0%* | 12.0% – 18.0%* | 16.5% | $190k – $350k+ £110k – £190k+ |
*Note: Senior roles in specialised AI, MLOps, and Cybersecurity are seeing outliers as high as 35% growth.
Another interesting phenomenon happening right now is the shortage of mid-level engineers.
During 2023 and 2024, many companies reduced graduate programmes, internships and junior hiring initiatives due to economic uncertainty and post-pandemic corrections. At the time, those decisions probably made financial sense to many businesses.
The problem is that the industry is now starting to feel the consequences of that reduction.
Those missing junior engineers never had the opportunity to develop into mid-level professionals and companies are now competing aggressively for engineers in that three-to-seven-year experience range. This shortage is one of the reasons why mid-level salaries are also increasing faster than expected.
The U.S. and European markets are also evolving differently.
The United States continues to dominate at the top end of compensation, particularly for senior AI-focused positions. Total compensation packages for highly experienced AI architects and infrastructure specialists have increased dramatically in recent years, especially in major technology hubs.
Europe, however, is developing in a different direction. Much of the current demand growth is being driven by regulation, compliance and data sovereignty concerns. Regulations such as the EU AI Act and NIS2 are creating demand for professionals who understand not only technology, but also governance, security and legal integration.
Cities such as London and Berlin are benefiting heavily from this trend.
The Value Shift
Overall, I believe the biggest transformation happening in the industry right now is a shift in what companies truly value.
Between 2020 and 2022, engineers were often rewarded primarily for how much they could build and how quickly they could ship features. In the current market, companies are increasingly rewarding engineers for their ability to evaluate, secure, orchestrate and guide systems built with AI assistance.
The value is gradually moving away from pure code generation and towards technical judgement and oversight.
Personally, I believe we are still only at the beginning of this transformation.
For anyone entering the market today, my recommendation would be to focus heavily on fundamentals. Learn how systems work. Understand architecture. Understand security. Learn how to reason about trade-offs and scalability. Learn why certain decisions are made rather than simply how to implement them.
AI can already generate a significant amount of code. Understanding whether that code should exist in the first place is becoming the truly valuable skill.
If your company is currently trying to understand how AI is impacting hiring, how to scale engineering teams efficiently or what skills are becoming truly valuable in this new market, feel free to get in touch with us at Techifide. We spend every day speaking with companies and engineers across the USA, Europe and Latin America and we are always happy to share what we are seeing in the market. The technology landscape is changing quickly, but one thing remains clear: strong engineers with good judgement have never been more valuable.