I want to hire mid-level and senior engineers who want to do their work with AI. Mostly I mean product engineers, the kind who take a feature from idea to finished and don't hand it off. Before I post the job, I wanted to know how hard this is going to be.
My short answer: applicants will be easy to get, and the people I want will be hard to get. There are a few hundred thousand of them in the country. Nearly all of them have jobs, and very few change jobs in any given month.
It is an employer's market
Indeed, the job site, tracks how many software jobs are posted. The count is about 23% below where it stood in February 2020, while postings for all jobs are 3% above.1
I also counted the posts in the two hiring discussions that Hacker News, a forum popular with startup engineers, runs each month. Companies post jobs in one, and people looking for work post in the other. In 2021 there were more than four job posts for every job seeker. So far in 2026 there are 1.6 job seekers for every job post.2
| Year | Job seeker posts per job post |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 0.34 |
| 2020 | 0.49 |
| 2021 | 0.23 |
| 2022 | 0.36 |
| 2023 | 1.11 |
| 2024 | 1.28 |
| 2025 | 1.11 |
| 2026 | 1.62 |
Both numbers say the same thing. Right now it is harder to find an engineering job than to fill one, which ought to be good news for someone hiring.
People who have jobs are keeping them
It is only partly good news, because the surplus is worst at the junior end.3 People in computer jobs are staying longer. The typical one has been with their employer 4.6 years, up from 4.3 two years ago, and workers at software, media and telecom companies are quitting at about two thirds the 2022 rate.4
Why? My guess going in was that they are worried about AI and don't want to be the newest hire somewhere when cuts come. A February survey of American workers who were staying in jobs they might otherwise leave found both fears. More than 80% said they would worry about being laid off first if they moved, and 70% worried about what AI would do to their job security.5 That survey covered all kinds of workers, though, and developers look less worried about AI. When Stack Overflow asked them last year whether AI is a threat to their current job, about 16% of the American ones said yes, and the answer was nearly the same for newer developers and for veterans.6
The plainer explanation has more support. In a Dice survey, 55% of tech workers said they were actively looking for a new job, and only 41% were confident they could find a good one.7 Most are looking, and fewer than half expect to find something good.
For me that means the people I want have good reasons to stay where they are. A job offer has to beat a job they already know.
How many of them are there?
Fewer than the headlines about AI suggest. JetBrains, which makes programming tools, surveyed more than 15,000 professional developers this summer. Most use AI every day, but only about a third let AI agents write most of their code.8 (An agent is an AI tool, such as Claude Code or Cursor, that writes and changes code on its own while the engineer directs it and checks the work.)
| Group | Share of developers | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Agents write most of it | about 31% | They direct the AI and check what it produces. |
| AI as an assistant | about 47% | They write code with AI help, and still do much of it themselves. |
| Mostly by hand | about 23% | They still write most of their code without AI. |
Apply that to the United States and the arithmetic goes like this. There are roughly 2 million employed software developers, and most are past the junior stage. If between 16% and 31% of those work the way I want, that is somewhere between 220,000 and 630,000 people. At the rate workers at software companies quit, a few thousand of them leave a job in a typical month, across the whole country.9
| Group | Estimate |
|---|---|
| Employed US software developers | 1.7 to 2.3 million |
| Past the junior stage | 1.4 to 2.0 million |
| And let AI agents write most of their code | 220,000 to 630,000 |
| And quit a job in a typical month | 2,500 to 7,200 |
This is rough arithmetic of my own, since nobody publishes the American share. The direction is clear enough. The group is large, and the part of it on the market at any moment is small.
Plenty of people will say they qualify
On Hacker News this year, 10.1% of job seekers' posts mention working with AI coding tools, and 6.9% of job posts do.10
| Quarter | Job posts | Job seeker posts |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 2025 | 0.3% | 0.8% |
| Q2 2025 | 0.7% | 0.8% |
| Q3 2025 | 2.5% | 2.2% |
| Q4 2025 | 2.4% | 2.6% |
| Q1 2026 | 5.3% | 5.6% |
| Q2 2026 | 6.5% | 10.7% |
| Q3 2026 | 9.4% | 13.2% |
So candidates bring this up more often than employers ask for it. The claim is easy to make and hard to check. In one survey covering all kinds of jobs, 59% of hiring professionals said their organization had hired someone who interviewed well on AI skills and then couldn't do the work.11
That points to where the work in this hire is. Finding people who say they work this way will be easy. Telling which of them do will take most of the time.
What they cost
The city matters less than I expected. Government wage data puts the middle software developer at about $136,000 a year nationally. The developer who earns more than three quarters of the others, a fair stand-in for a senior engineer, makes about $172,000. Austin, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago and Dallas all sit within a few percent of those figures. The big coastal tech hubs pay much more.12
| Metro area | Median salary | 75th percentile salary |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $187,000 | $220,000 |
| Seattle | $167,000 | $212,000 |
| New York | $167,000 | $206,000 |
| Boston | $166,000 | $184,000 |
| Denver | $138,000 | $171,000 |
| United States | $136,000 | $172,000 |
| Chicago | $134,000 | $168,000 |
| Austin | $134,000 | $169,000 |
| Dallas | $133,000 | $164,000 |
| Atlanta | $133,000 | $164,000 |
What moves pay more is who else is bidding. The government figures are salary only, and the large tech companies pay in stock on top. Senior engineers in Austin who report their pay to Levels.fyi show a median of $225,000 in total. Google's senior level, across the country, comes to $446,000.13
I couldn't find a credible number for what an engineer who is good with AI tools earns over one who isn't.14 Pay is moving little.15
As far as I can tell, this hire costs about what any good senior engineer costs in the same city. The competition that matters is the employers who can pay in stock.
What I still don't know
How long this group stays a minority. Stack Overflow found that the share of developers who use agents at work at all went from 31% to 59% in a year.16 That is a looser test than mine. If heavy use grows anywhere near as fast, this note will soon be out of date.
- Indeed Hiring Lab's job postings index, as of September 18, 2026. Software postings peaked in February 2022 at more than double their February 2020 level. They are up about 18% over the past year. ↩︎
- My count of 186 monthly threads from January 2019 through September 2026. Hacker News skews toward startups, and how many companies post there depends partly on the site's own traffic. In August 2026 there were 2.4 seekers per job post. ↩︎
- Recent computer science graduates had 7.0% unemployment against 4.2% for all majors, in the New York Fed's figures for 2024. At companies that run payroll through ADP, the number of employed developers aged 22 to 25 is down 19.5% since November 2022, and developers in their forties are up by the same amount. On Indeed, entry-level roles are 4.5% of software postings and senior roles are 69.3%. ↩︎
- Tenure is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' January 2026 median for computer and mathematical occupations. The quit rate is for the information sector, which covers every job at software, media and telecom companies: about 1.15% a month in 2026 through August, against 1.7% in 2022. Quitting fell by about the same proportion across all industries. Tenure was 3.9 years in 2020. ↩︎
- ResumeBuilder survey of 2,188 US workers, February 2026. Both percentages are of the 1,250 who said they were holding on to a job. ↩︎
- My tabulation of the Stack Overflow 2025 survey data: 5,463 US developers by profession. 16.5% said yes, 63.6% said no and 19.9% weren't sure. By experience, yes was 15.0% at five years or fewer, 16.0% at six to ten, and 16.9% at eleven or more. ↩︎
- Dice survey of 1,159 US tech professionals, late 2025. Dice is a job board, so its respondents lean toward people who are looking. In the same survey 88% said employers hold the power. ↩︎
- JetBrains found 68% of developers using AI agents daily. It sorts developers into three groups of about 31%, 47% and 23%, and separately reports that about 22% let agents write more than 80% of their code. That last figure is about 16% in Europe and 32% to 35% in East Asia. JetBrains gives no figure for the US. ↩︎
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 1.69 million software developers in its employer survey and 2.25 million in its household survey. I assume 80% to 90% are past the junior stage, since about 6% are under 25. I then apply 16% to 31% from the JetBrains survey, and the 1.15% monthly quit rate from note 4. Separately, Apollo, a business contact database, lists about 265,000 people in the US with senior, staff, principal or lead software engineer titles, and 46% of them work at companies with more than 10,000 employees. ↩︎
- A keyword search for tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex and for phrases such as "coding agents." About 13% of the matches I checked by hand were wrong, and a mention is not a requirement, so treat the gap as rough. ↩︎
- TestGorilla survey of 1,928 hiring professionals in the US and UK, covering all kinds of jobs. TestGorilla sells hiring tests. Many employers also don't let candidates use AI in the interview: 34% ban it in CoderPad's survey and 62% in Karat's, which covers the US, India and China. ↩︎
- Bureau of Labor Statistics wages for software developers, May 2025, read from O*NET's local wage tables. The national median is $135,980 and the 75th percentile is $171,980. The government doesn't publish pay by seniority, so treating the median as mid-level and the 75th percentile as senior is my approximation. Job ads that state pay run higher for mid-level and about the same for senior: $149,800 and $173,200. San Jose, San Diego, Los Angeles and Boulder also pay well above the national figure and are not in the chart. ↩︎
- Self-reported salary, stock and bonus on Levels.fyi, whose users lean toward large tech companies: $225,000 for senior engineers in Austin and $177,000 in Atlanta. Google's US averages are about $303,000 at its mid level and $446,000 at its senior level, as of October 1, 2026. ↩︎
- The published premiums are for engineers who build AI systems. Levels.fyi data puts that between about 14% and about 29%, depending on level. ↩︎
- Robert Half projects starting pay in technology rising 1.6% in 2026. Levels.fyi shows US software engineer pay up 2.67% in 2025, and senior engineers up 4.2%. Posted salaries are down 1.3% on the year. ↩︎
- Stack Overflow: 31% in its 2025 survey and 59% in a smaller poll in April 2026. Both count use of agents at any frequency. ↩︎