Engineering hiring remains resilient despite AI fears, new data shows

While AI has become the go-to justification for recent tech layoffs—May saw the highest single-month job cuts in years—the hiring data tells a markedly different story. Venture firm SignalFire tracked employment trends across more than 80 million companies and found that engineering remains the job category most insulated from automation.

The data paradox#

Despite doom-and-gloom predictions that AI coding tools would make engineers obsolete, SignalFire's analysis reveals engineering roles actually contracted less than other functions at major tech firms. While overall hiring at large tech companies dropped 25% versus 2019 levels, engineering hiring fell just 11%. At the 12 firms SignalFire calls "Tech Majors"—Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe—engineers now comprise 55% of new hires, up from 46% in 2019.

Early-stage startups tell the same story, hiring 7% more engineers in 2025 than they did in 2019.

What executives are seeing#

The gap between rhetoric and reality extends to AI company leaders themselves. While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs, Anthropic's head of economics found no measurable impact on unemployment rates among workers heavily exposed to AI tools. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went further, arguing that agentic AI doesn't displace engineers but makes them more productive and pushes them to tackle harder problems: "software engineers are busier than ever."

SignalFire researcher Asher Bantock notes that the consistent hiring appetite for engineering talent suggests something closer to the Jevons paradox—greater efficiency expands the total amount of work rather than shrinking it. "They're suddenly a lot more productive, and there's endless work for them to do," he said.

Read more: State of Talent Report 2026