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Carl-W for remoet.dev

Posted on • Originally published at remoet.dev

Tech Job Market Report: May 2026

The remote-first job market is a smaller pond than the discourse suggests.

12,798 active tech jobs across the 1,056 companies we track on remoet.dev. 1,788 of them are fully remote. That is 14%. The other 86% want you in a chair somewhere, full or part time. The May numbers are below.

Where the work actually is

Location policy Jobs Share
Fully remote 1,788 14%
Remote, region-restricted 2,611 20%
Hybrid 2,079 16%
Onsite 1,493 12%
Unspecified 4,827 38%

The "unspecified" bucket is the one to be honest about. Most career-page scrapers don't normalize location policy, and in practice those jobs tend onsite or region-restricted. Read the listing before you celebrate.

Hiring is concentrated

The top 15 companies have 3,143 open roles between them. Almost a quarter of the entire pool.

  1. Databricks, 407
  2. Speechify, 381
  3. OpenAI, 256
  4. Airwallex, 222
  5. Canonical, 216
  6. Snowflake, 203
  7. Anthropic, 175
  8. Roblox, 171
  9. Relativity, 166
  10. Zscaler, 162
  11. MongoDB, 161
  12. Cloudflare, 156
  13. Sezzle, 147
  14. Stripe, 142
  15. Nebius, 136

If you have not starred the 30 to 50 companies that match your stack, you are missing where the jobs actually are. Job-board search is keyword soup. The leverage is in narrowing to the cluster, then watching that cluster.

What pays

Salary bands by tech, from 3,338 postings with disclosed USD comp. The data skews toward US states with pay-transparency laws (CA, CO, NY, WA), so absolute levels run high. Filtered to techs with at least 50 postings.

Tech Avg low Avg high Postings
PyTorch $237k $381k 75
LLM $214k $296k 150
Rust $210k $285k 109
Spark $187k $267k 164
GCP $187k $251k 321
Azure $185k $250k 227
Snowflake $181k $242k 73
Python $181k $252k 748
Kubernetes $176k $249k 385
Go $176k $236k 234
Scala $175k $248k 94

The rank is more useful than the absolute numbers. PyTorch leads. AI ecosystem stuff (LLM, AI, Spark) clusters in the $180k to $290k band. Python on its own pays the same as Go. The premium is in what you stack on top of Python, not Python itself. If you are getting offers in the $130k to $160k range and the table above looks alien, the gap is geographic and disclosure-driven, not skill-driven.

The junior squeeze

328 active postings tag themselves as junior-level. About 2.6% of everything open. The split:

  • Senior: 5,707
  • Mid: 1,936
  • Junior: 328

Senior outnumbers junior seventeen to one. If you are in your first three years, the market is genuinely tight for you. The play is not to apply harder. The play is to treat the junior subset as your working set, sort by company-stack match, and apply where you have a credible argument.

Why this report is shorter than last month

We expanded coverage substantially through April. Month-over-month job totals look inflated until the new sources stabilize. Treat absolute numbers as current snapshots, not as growth signals, until the next report.

If you want to slice this data yourself by stack, location, or experience level, connect an AI agent to Remoet via MCP and ask it directly. It is faster than any filter UI and a lot more honest than keyword search.

Full report on the Remoet blog.

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