Fields
Where the work is
Each field was mapped the same way: pull every posting from public ATS boards, match by title, parse the full description text, and cluster into archetypes by what the postings actually ask for rather than what they are called.
2,609 roles · 659 JDs parsed
Software Engineering
2,609 postings — the largest field here. AI appears in 89% of them, and product sense in 84%, which is higher than distributed systems at 75%. Mentorship is named in 43%, explicit testing language in 9%.
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1,558 roles · 592 JDs parsed
Artificial Intelligence
Seven archetypes across 1,558 postings. The market split into an applied majority and a frontier minority, and most preparation targets the smaller one.
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1,405 roles · 427 JDs parsed
Platform & Developer Experience
Seven archetypes across 1,405 postings. What the field discusses loudest — internal developer platforms, DORA, supply chain — appears in under 5% of postings.
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1,060 roles · 362 JDs parsed
Cyber, Risk & Internal Audit
Seven archetypes across 1,060 postings. AI appears in 92% of them — but AI-specific risk practice in only 9%. That gap is the opportunity.
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670 roles · 243 JDs parsed
IT Infrastructure
Network, servers, storage, datacentre and production management. 670 postings — and 26% of them are AI and GPU cluster buildout, which has revived a field people had written off.
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182 roles · 104 JDs parsed
Identity & Privileged Access
Identity appears in 87% of all security postings — the highest of any single topic. Agent identity is becoming a job title in its own right.
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2,082 roles · 337 India postings via Workday
GCC, Site & Engineering Leadership
2,082 leadership postings, and a finding that matters if you are aiming at one: the classic GCC Head role barely appears on public boards. What does appear, in volume, is Principal IC and Engineering Manager.
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1,480 roles · 481 JDs parsed
Product, Delivery & Technology Finance
1,480 postings — and two findings that should change where you aim. The dedicated agile-ceremony roles have effectively vanished at these employers, and FinOps barely exists as a title even though cost is a stated responsibility in 40% of postings.
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237 roles · 114 JDs parsed across two corpora
Data Platform & Analytics
237 postings, and the ranking is not what the field's own discourse talks about: privacy and compliance appear in 82% — more than SQL — half name cost, and real-time outnumbers batch seven to one. A reader-supplied sample adds two more: Databricks or Snowflake named in 66% of enterprise postings, and statistics in 44%.
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1,426 roles · 494 JDs parsed
Technical Go-To-Market & Customer Success
1,426 postings. Customer-facing language in 99% of them and technical depth in 60% — these are technical roles that engineers dismiss and that are consequently under-competed relative to what they pay.
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2,173 roles · 690 JDs parsed
Sales
2,173 postings — the largest single category in the corpus. Quota in 87%, self-generated pipeline in 84%, and technical depth in 56%, which is the door for anyone crossing over from an engineering background.
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185 roles · 31 JDs parsed
Product Design & UX
185 postings, and AI appears in 93% of them — the highest share of any field measured here. Accessibility is named in 51%, which is higher than most designers expect.
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632 roles · 141 JDs parsed
Legal, Finance & People
632 postings. Scaling appears in 93%, data and analytics in 91% and AI in 84% — these functions are being asked to build systems rather than process transactions, which is what makes them different from their equivalents elsewhere.
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India + US · written from exchange, regulator and vendor sources
Trading & Capital Markets
Eight archetypes across the buy side, the sell side, exchanges, brokers and the firms that keep the market honest. Written for both the Indian and the US market, because the plumbing differs more than people expect and the interviews differ with it.
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