Engineering jobs are holding up best in the AI era, according to a new SignalFire analysis that says engineering roles were the most resilient in 2025 even as overall tech hiring fell sharply from 2019 levels and layoffs kept grabbing headlines.
That split matters because layoffs are a noisy signal, and hiring is usually the cleaner one. SignalFire says it looked at more than 650 million workers across more than 80 million companies, and chose hiring as the better measure of what employers actually value right now.
Engineering hiring stayed stronger than the rest
The numbers are stubborn. Overall hiring was down 25% compared with 2019, but engineering hiring fell only 11%. Startups actually hired 7% more engineers in 2025 than in 2019, which is not what you would expect if software development were being quietly automated into irrelevance.
In the 12 biggest tech companies SignalFire tracked – Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe – engineers made up 55% of all new hires in 2025, up from 46% in 2019. That is a pretty loud answer to the idea that AI is simply replacing technical staff wholesale.
Why AI is boosting demand for engineers
The twist is that AI tools are making engineers faster, not obsolete. Jensen Huang said in April that when technical workers use AI agents, software engineers are busier than ever because the tools push them toward the next idea instead of ending the work there.
That fits a classic Jevons paradox pattern: make something more efficient and demand rises because people find more ways to use it. In tech, the bottleneck is shifting from writing basic code to deciding what to build next, which is exactly the sort of job humans are still annoyingly good at.
Layoffs are rising, but hiring tells a different story
This does not mean AI is harmless. Challenger, Gray & Christmas said May layoffs were the highest in years, and many companies blamed AI for the cuts. But layoffs often reflect cost-cutting, restructuring, or a convenient excuse, while hiring shows where companies are still willing to spend.
The practical takeaway is simple: engineering is not disappearing first. If anything, it is absorbing more of the tech sector’s headcount as companies race to build AI products, wire them into existing systems, and keep up with competitors that are doing the same.
The next pressure point for tech hiring
The open question is whether this resilience lasts once AI tools move from novelty to routine infrastructure. If the current pattern holds, the jobs under pressure are more likely to be the repeatable support roles around engineering, not the engineers themselves – at least until companies decide they can get away with being less ambitious.