Which Tech Companies Are Actually Hiring Engineers in 2026?

April 2026 · Based on curated live job listings from top tech employer career pages

The headlines have been contradictory. Big tech layoffs. AI hiring surge. Return-to-office mandates. Fintech freezes. If you are a software engineer trying to make sense of the job market right now, the noise is real, but so is the opportunity, if you know where to look.

At The Code Deck, we curate live computer science roles directly from company career portals via Greenhouse and other first-party sources. Here is what the data tells us about where engineers are actually getting hired in 2026.

The Big Picture: Two-Speed Market

In 2025, 783 tech layoff events affected nearly 246,000 workers, roughly 674 people per day across the sector (TrueUp). Amazon cut 30,000 corporate employees across two rounds. Microsoft made approximately 15,000 cuts. Meta trimmed 5,000 roles. Google made smaller but consistent reductions through the year. These are real numbers, and they matter.

What the headline layoff figures miss is what was happening in parallel. AI infrastructure companies raised over $150 billion in venture capital in 2025 alone, more than 40% of all global VC that year. Anthropic closed a $30 billion round in February 2026 at a $380 billion valuation. OpenAI closed a $110 billion round, the largest private technology financing in history. Databricks raised $4 billion at a $134 billion valuation in December 2025 and announced plans to hire 3,000 engineers.

The result is a market running at two speeds. Large public tech companies are managing headcount carefully. A cohort of mid-stage and AI-native companies are growing fast and actively recruiting. The opportunity is real, but it is concentrated.

Companies That Are Actively Hiring

Based on live job board data and publicly available hiring signals, these companies have been consistently posting engineering roles in early 2026:

AI Infrastructure and Tooling

• Anthropic is one of the most active hirers in the market right now. Revenue surpassed $19 billion annualised as of March 2026 (up from $9 billion at end of 2025) and the company is discussing an IPO targeting $60 billion+. Hiring spans model training, inference infrastructure, safety engineering, and product.
• Databricks raised $4 billion at a $134 billion valuation, is growing revenue at 55%+ year-on-year, and has over 700 open roles. It announced a $250 million investment in India alone in 2025.
• Cohere has reached $240 million in annual recurring revenue and is among the top IPO candidates for 2026. Hiring is focused on applied ML and platform engineering.
• Mistral AI reached a $14 billion valuation in September 2025 after a €2 billion Series C. It is expanding its European engineering base in Paris and London.

Fintech (Selectively)

• Stripe cut 300 employees in January 2025 but simultaneously reaffirmed a target to grow to 10,000 employees by end of 2025, a 17% headcount increase. Over 500 open roles were listed as of early 2026. Hiring is concentrated in payments infrastructure, developer experience, and data engineering.
• Ramp is one of the more aggressive hirers in fintech, with engineering internships paying $11,000 per month and active hiring in backend, full-stack, and AI operations roles.
• Monzo continues to post consistently in the UK, particularly for backend engineers with distributed systems experience. Its stack centres on Go, Kotlin, and Python.

Infrastructure and Developer Tools

• Cloudflare announced a goal to hire 1,111 interns in 2026, its most ambitious programme to date, with a particular focus on AI. It is also expanding offices in Austin, London, and Lisbon.
• Vercel is growing its platform and developer experience engineering teams as the Next.js ecosystem continues to expand.
• Temporal is expanding as its workflow orchestration platform gains enterprise traction. Backend and distributed systems engineers are in demand.

Enterprise SaaS

• Linear, Notion, and Figma are all posting engineering roles consistently. These companies hire with a high bar but offer strong engineering cultures and stable growth trajectories.

Which Roles Are in Highest Demand

AI and ML engineer job postings grew 88% year-on-year in 2025, according to Robert Half. Generative AI roles specifically were up 170% from January 2024 to January 2025 (Indeed Hiring Lab). The share of AI and ML roles in total tech job postings went from 10% to 50% between 2023 and 2025. This is not a gradual shift, it is a structural reallocation of engineering hiring budgets.

Backend and Infrastructure Engineering remains the foundation of most hiring. Companies need engineers who can build reliable, scalable systems. Go, Rust, and Python are consistently requested. Engineers with distributed systems experience, Kafka, Kubernetes, and observability tooling are in high demand across virtually every growth-stage company.

AI and ML Infrastructure is the fastest-growing and highest-paying category. The demand is specifically for engineers who can build the systems that train, serve, and evaluate models at scale: inference optimisation, GPU cluster management, ML platform engineering, and evaluation frameworks. Per Levels.fyi Q3 2025 data, AI engineers earn a 14% salary premium at senior level and an 18.7% premium at Staff level compared to non-AI peers. The average AI engineer salary jumped to $206,000 in 2025, up $50,000 year-on-year.

Security Engineering has seen consistent demand growth. With AI systems handling sensitive data and regulatory pressure increasing under the EU AI Act, AppSec, infrastructure security, and trust-and-safety engineering are all active. CompTIA projects cybersecurity analyst roles to grow 367% through 2033.

Front-end and full-stack generalist hiring has become more competitive. Entry-level tech hiring dropped 25% year-on-year in 2024, and tech employment fell 6% for workers aged 22 to 25. For junior and mid-level generalist roles, specificity and portfolio work matter more than they did two years ago.

Salary Ranges in 2026

Levels.fyi reports a median US software engineer total compensation of $190,500 in 2025. At the top end, OpenAI's median total comp sits at $550,000. The Levels.fyi figures include equity, which skews the US numbers significantly. European cash compensation is more representative of what most engineers take home. Approximate ranges:

Equity at pre-IPO companies remains meaningful. Anthropic, Databricks, and Cohere are all plausible IPO candidates in 2026. A senior engineer joining any of these on a four-year vest may see compensation well above the cash ranges above. The variance is high and the timing unpredictable, but the potential is real in a way it was not at most companies a few years ago.

Remote vs. In-Office in 2026

The data here is more nuanced than most reporting suggests. According to Robert Half's Q4 2025 survey, 58% of tech roles are now fully on-site, 29% hybrid, and just 13% fully remote. Amazon enforced a full five-day in-office mandate for all 350,000 corporate employees from January 2025. Microsoft moved to three days from February 2026. Meta requires three days across most divisions.

However, research from the University of Chicago and University of Michigan found that after RTO mandates, Microsoft saw its share of senior employees drop by five percentage points, and Apple by four, as experienced talent moved to competitors offering flexibility. Companies enforcing strict RTO see 23% longer vacancy fill times and a 17% drop in hiring rates.

For engineers who need remote flexibility, the options exist but require deliberate filtering. Fully remote job postings actually increased 3% in Q4 2025 after cooling earlier in the year. Developer tooling companies in particular tend to hire distributed-first, often across Europe and North America regardless of city.

Best Cities and Countries for Tech Jobs in 2026

London remains the deepest engineering job market outside the US. Fintech, AI, and infrastructure companies are all well represented. The Global Talent Visa and Skilled Worker route make it accessible for international engineers.

Berlin and Amsterdam offer strong markets for mid-stage product companies and infrastructure businesses, with lower cost bases than London. The EU AI Act is creating sustained demand for compliance and safety-focused engineering roles across Europe.

San Francisco and New York still offer the highest raw compensation and the highest density of well-funded early-stage companies. The AI infrastructure ecosystem is heavily concentrated in San Francisco, where Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and dozens of funded AI companies are all based.

Toronto and Vancouver have grown as alternatives for engineers seeking North American compensation with different immigration and lifestyle trade-offs.

Remote-first distributed teams, particularly in developer tooling, often hire across Europe and North America regardless of city. This remains an underappreciated option for engineers in smaller markets. LinkedIn's Jobs on the Rise 2026 report identifies founders and independent consultants as among the fastest-growing categories as workers adapt to market uncertainty.

What This Means If You Are Searching Right Now

The market rewards specificity. Engineers who can clearly articulate their focus, not just "backend engineer" but "distributed systems, Kafka, Go, large-scale data pipelines", are getting traction faster. Companies at growth stages are hiring to fill specific gaps, not generic capacity. Robert Half found that 65% of tech leaders say it is harder to find skilled talent in 2026 than a year ago, despite the headline layoff numbers.

The most pragmatic approach:

• Target companies at Series B through pre-IPO with strong revenue signals. Databricks, Anthropic, Cohere, Ramp, and Stripe all fit this profile and are actively hiring.
• Prioritise roles in infrastructure, backend systems, and AI-adjacent tooling. These areas are structurally growing, not cyclically recovering.
• Be clear about remote requirements early. It narrows the pool but saves time on both sides, and the pool of remote-friendly roles is not as small as the RTO headlines suggest.
• Look seriously at European opportunities if you are based there. The AI Act, growing enterprise software demand, and a maturing VC ecosystem are all pushing sustained engineering hiring across the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands.

The market is not as frothy as 2021, and it is not as bleak as 2022 to 2023 suggested it would be. It is a functional market with clear winners. Knowing which side of the two-speed divide a company sits on is the most important research any job seeker can do right now.