Job market insights

What the numbers say across our live corpus of 23,289 jobs at 294 companies — who pays best, which skills are in demand, and where the hiring is.

Published by FindRole · computed · Methodology

Key findings

  • As of September 2026, 78% of the 23,289 live US technology roles tracked by FindRole disclose a salary range (18,233 postings).
  • As of September 2026, the median advertised base salary across those roles is $177,900, with the middle 80% falling between $119,646 and $254,950 (18,223 postings with an annual range).
  • As of September 2026, 14.2% of tracked roles are fully remote, 15.7% are hybrid and 70.1% are onsite.
  • As of September 2026, the most requested skill across the corpus is Python, named in 9,547 postings.
  • As of September 2026, the highest-paying tracked job family is Engineering Director, at a median advertised $316,094 across 30 priced postings.

These figures are free to quote and reuse, including commercially, with attribution and a link to findrole.ai/stats. Quote the date above with the number — the corpus is recomputed nightly. How these are computed.

Median pay
$177,900
18,223 roles with pay transparency
Typical range (10th–90th pct)
$119,646 – $254,950
band midpoint, annual roles
Remote roles
14.2%
15.7% hybrid · 70.1% onsite

How trustworthy are these listings?

Every role is scored 0–1 on believability — how unique it is (vs. near-duplicate reposts), how detailed its description is, how fresh it is, and how often it’s been reposted. Higher means more likely a real, current opening. This is the score behind the “listing trust” badge on every result.

0.419
median score · 23,289 roles
0.00.250.50.751.0
less believable ←  believability score  → more believable
High trust
78.8%
18,362 roles · score 7–10
Trusted
13.5%
3,136 roles · score 4–6
Low trust
7.7%
1,791 roles · score 1–3

Highest-paying cities

Median pay by metro (≥40 salary transparent roles each).

  1. 1. Mountain View, CA $238,250
    129 salary transparent roles
  2. 2. Cupertino, CA $231,150
    683 salary transparent roles
  3. 3. Seattle, WA $220,800
    430 salary transparent roles
  4. 4. Santa Clara, CA $218,500
    983 salary transparent roles
  5. 5. San Jose, CA $217,725
    557 salary transparent roles

Best-paying companies

Average pay across each company's salary transparent roles (≥5 each).

  1. 1. Netflix $563,241
    27 salary transparent roles
  2. 2. Block $262,762
    52 salary transparent roles
  3. 3. Pinterest $259,839
    82 salary transparent roles
  4. 4. Reddit $257,134
    77 salary transparent roles
  5. 5. Novartis $255,346
    26 salary transparent roles

Does remote pay more?

Median pay by work arrangement.

  1. Remote $192,050
    2,860 salary transparent roles
  2. Hybrid $177,250
    2,790 salary transparent roles
  3. Onsite $177,250
    12,678 salary transparent roles

Top-paying remote roles

The best-paid fully-remote openings right now.

  1. Director, Technical Program Management - Ads Foundations, Supply & Decisioning · Netflix $860,000
  2. Vice President of Enterprise Sales, East · Okta Inc $700,000
  3. Senior Director, Key & Enterprise Sales · Affirm $520,000
  4. Senior Director of Engineering, Developer and Agent Experience · Toast, Inc. $408,000
  5. Distinguished Engineer, Scaled Out Inferencing · Nvidia $404,375

Cities hiring the most

Where open roles are concentrated.

  1. 1. New York, NY 1,170
  2. 2. Santa Clara, CA 1,007
  3. 3. Austin, TX 903
  4. 4. Costa Mesa, CA 890
  5. 5. San Diego, CA 755

Companies hiring the most

Employers with the most open roles.

  1. 1. Apple Inc 1,984
  2. 2. Anduril Industries 1,697
  3. 3. General Dynamics 1,123
  4. 4. JPMorgan Chase 1,117
  5. 5. Capital One Financial 998

Most in-demand skills

The skills mentioned across the most job postings.

Python 9,547 AWS 4,684 Java 4,562 CI/CD 3,945 SQL 3,628 Agile 3,486 Kubernetes 3,415 C++ 3,191 Machine Learning 3,178 Linux 2,532

Job titles commanding the best pay

Median salary by standardized role (seniority-stripped; roles on ≥25 pay-transparent listings).

Engineering Director 30 roles $316,094
Account Executive 25 roles $277,500
Software Engineering Director 28 roles $267,350
Engineering Manager 138 roles $267,050
Product Management Director 52 roles $261,500
Lead AI Engineer 64 roles $246,150
Machine Learning Engineer 241 roles $241,750
Systems Software Engineer 31 roles $235,750
System Software Engineer 43 roles $235,750
Architect 28 roles $231,525

Skills commanding the best pay

Average salary for roles requiring a below skill (skills on ≥25 pay transparent roles).

Ranking 28 roles $285,335
RLHF 83 roles $267,833
Inference Optimization 36 roles $267,805
Payments 28 roles $262,983
Feature Stores 37 roles $261,771
NeMo 35 roles $258,996
ROCm 50 roles $258,643
HIP 27 roles $256,903
Distributed Training 103 roles $256,877
Recommender Systems 33 roles $253,123

Role Aggregation Momentum

New role postings added per month.

979
Apr 2026
1,038
May 2026
2,831
Jun 2026
4,863
Jul 2026
9,170
Aug 2026
4,115
Sep 2026

What the corpus looks like

A semantic breakdown of 4,000 sampled roles, grouped by career field using our vector search models — not keyword matching, so related titles cluster even when they share no words.

Cloud & DevOps 30.1%
AI & Machine Learning 23.4%
Cybersecurity 7.7%
Data & Analytics 7.2%
Software Engineering 6.9%
Sales & Marketing 3.5%
Product & Design 2.2%
IT & Support 1.4%
Finance & Accounting 0.3%
Operations & Logistics 0.2%
Other / niche 17.1%

Which fields pay best

Median salary by career field, where each role is grouped by what it actually is — its nearest field in our vector search models — rather than its job title. The semantic answer to "which titles pay most," without depending on messy title text.

AI & Machine Learning $231,150
Product & Design $221,750
Software Engineering $196,750
Cloud & DevOps $196,750
Sales & Marketing $191,188
Data & Analytics $185,750
Cybersecurity $170,000
IT & Support $129,750

Pay figures use the midpoint of each listed salary band and count only annual roles with credible pay data. Figures refresh daily.