May 2026
Jobs Report

Tech job postings increased 5% month-over-month in April, continuing the upward trend that has now persisted for several months. More notably, postings are up 21% year-over-year compared to April 2025 — the strongest year-over-year gain of 2026 so far and a signal that the market has moved past recovery into sustained expansion.

AI skill requirements reached 71% of U.S. tech job postings in April, up from 67% in March. Year-over-year, that figure has grown 181% from April 2025. AI fluency is no longer a differentiating credential in most tech roles and instead has become a baseline expectation.

Regional hiring patterns show continued recovery

Eight of the top 10 states by hiring volume posted month-over-month gains in April, with New Jersey (+35%), Pennsylvania (+21%), and Maryland (+15%) leading the group. Florida held flat and New York declined slightly (-2%). Year-over-year, all top states posted positive growth, with New Jersey (+73%), Maryland (+45%), and Illinois (+45%) at the top of the list.

At the metro level, Philadelphia led with 36% month-over-month growth, followed by Chicago (+15%), San Francisco (+13%), New York City (+12%), and Washington D.C. (+11%). Philadelphia’s performance is consistent with broader reporting on the region’s tech expansion: the market ranks among the top 20 U.S. tech labor markets, with growth concentrated in healthcare IT, financial services technology, and applied AI.

Year-over-year, nine of the top 10 metro areas posted positive growth. Philadelphia led with 69% growth, followed by Chicago (+50%), Boston (+40%), and New York City (+39%). Atlanta was the only major metro to post a year-over-year decline (-4%).

Job titles posting month-over-month growth above 150% in April include: Radar Systems Engineers, Clinical Data Managers, Storage Engineers, Systems Integration and Test Engineers, Digital Product Owners, Radar Signal Processing Engineers, Application Analysts, Vulnerability Management Analysts, SQL Developers, and Configuration Analysts.

The skill data tells a coherent story, split across two distinct but related themes.

Month-over-month skills growth

The fastest-growing skills in April — Systems Development (90%), Applied Mathematics (76%), Signal Processing (56%), Field-Programmable Gate Array/FPGA (51%), Simulations (44%), and MATLAB (42%) — are not general-purpose tech skills. They are the technical foundation of engineering-intensive defense and aerospace work. FPGA, Signal Processing, MATLAB, and Simulations are core to radar and embedded systems development; their growth alongside Radar Systems Engineers and Radar Signal Processing Engineers in the job titles list is not coincidental. These skills are moving together because defense contractors are ramping hiring in response to elevated DoD budgets and a broader push toward next-generation sensing and autonomous systems.

Functional Knowledge (77%) and Kotlin (47%) reflect parallel demand: enterprise software and mobile platform development continuing alongside the defense-driven wave. Financial Modeling (45%) aligns with Finance/Banking’s 34% month-over-month industry gain.

Year-over-year skills growth (250%+)

Agentic AI, AI Agents, Responsible AI, Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure, Vector Database, Database Software, Prompt Engineering, Cybersecurity Compliance, and Systems Thinking paint a clear picture of where the AI market has moved over the past twelve months.

The concentration of Agentic AI, AI Agents, RAG, and Vector Database reflects the industry’s shift from assistive AI tools toward systems capable of completing multi-step tasks with limited human oversight. Database Software and AI Infrastructure are growing alongside them because production-scale agentic systems require dedicated data and compute infrastructure to operate reliably. Responsible AI and Cybersecurity Compliance are growing for the same reason: autonomous systems introduce governance and security requirements that organizations are now actively building for. Systems Thinking rounds out this cluster and as AI architectures grow more complex, employers are placing a premium on professionals who can reason across the full system, not just individual components.