June 2026
Jobs Report

Tech job postings increased 2% month-over-month in May, continuing the upward trend that has now persisted for several months. Year-over-year, postings are up 23% compared to May 2025 – the strongest year-over-year comparison of 2026 so far and a signal that the market has moved from recovery into sustained expansion.

AI skill requirements reached 73% of U.S. tech job postings in May, up from 71% in April. Year-over-year, that figure has grown 192% from May 2025. AI fluency has become a baseline expectation across most tech roles rather than a differentiating credential.

Regional hiring patterns show continued recovery

Half of the top 10 states by hiring volume posted month-over-month gains in May, led by New York (+8%) and Florida (+6%). Virginia and North Carolina each grew 3%, while Texas increased 1%. The remaining five states saw modest declines, including California and Massachusetts (both -1%), Maryland (-6%), New Jersey (-8%), and Illinois (-12%). Despite the mixed monthly performance, all 10 states maintained positive year-over-year growth, indicating the slowdown is more likely a sign of market normalization than a broader pullback.

Year-over-year, New Jersey (+63%) and Massachusetts (+52%) continued to lead all top states.

At the metro level, Los Angeles (+13%) posted the only double-digit month-over-month gain among the top 10. That performance is consistent with the market’s expanding tech base: LA’s aerospace and defense sector – led by companies including Anduril Industries, SpaceX, and Northrop Grumman – has been scaling hiring in areas such as autonomous systems, edge AI, and AI-driven threat detection. Seattle (+8%) and Washington D.C. (+5%) also posted solid month-over-month gains.

San Francisco (-6%), San Jose (-8%), and Chicago (-13%) declined month-over-month. Year-over-year, Boston (+51%), New York (+45%), and Washington D.C. (+39%) led all top metros. Seattle was the only major metro to post no year-over-year change.

Job titles posting month-over-month growth above 150% in May include: Python Engineers, Operations Engineers, Business Applications Analysts, Transformation Managers, Data Infrastructure Engineers, Security Governance Managers, Offensive Security Engineers, Configuration Engineers, SAP Finance Consultants, Data Center Architects, Information Systems Security Engineers, Autonomy Engineers, and Oracle HCM Consultants.

The skill data reflects two related themes playing out simultaneously.

Month-over-month skills growth

The fastest-growing skills in May – Rust (71%), Software Architecture (61%), Design Software (55%), Benchmarking (52%), Infrastructure Automation (39%), and API Design (38%) – point to foundational platform investment rather than application-layer development. Rust’s growth reflects an enterprise adoption wave already underway: nearly half of all companies now use it in production, drawn to its combination of memory safety and performance for systems and infrastructure work. Software Architecture, API Design, and Infrastructure Automation are moving for the same reason.

Datadog (42%) and Amazon CloudWatch (40%) fit the same theme as core observability tools for production systems. SD-WAN (40%) and GDPR (39%) reflect a parallel thread: network modernization and data governance compliance build-out.

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

Agentic AI, AI Agents, Responsible AI, Vector Database, AI Infrastructure, Prompt Engineering, RAG, and Systems Thinking show where the AI market has moved over the past twelve months. The concentration of agentic and retrieval-focused skills reflects a market that has shifted from deploying assistive AI tools toward building systems capable of completing multi-step tasks with limited human oversight. Vector Database 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: as autonomous systems take on more consequential tasks, governance and security requirements are becoming active hiring criteria. Observability, Telemetry, Anomaly Detection, and Exception Handling round out the picture – at scale, agentic systems require the same instrumentation that any production system requires, and employers are building for that from the start.