October 2026 tech job market: what Indeed's numbers show

The US job market is apparently recovering, but someone forgot to tell software engineering.

Indeed just released its October 2026 labor market snapshot, and the numbers are a wonderful example of why national hiring headlines can be spectacularly useless when you're looking for a tech job.

Software postings are still well below pre-pandemic

Overall job postings are up 2.8% from a year ago. Sounds promising, right?

Except software development postings are still roughly 21% below their pre-pandemic level. Meanwhile, engineering roles are booming, particularly in mechanical, civil and electrical engineering.

The AI jobs are in data centers

And before someone tells you AI is creating jobs everywhere, here's the real deal:

Data-center-related job postings are up 147% since June 2024. They climbed another 20% in just the last three months. Tech postings outside data centers? Essentially flat over that same period.

Turns out the AI revolution needs an awful lot of people to build, power and maintain the buildings where the GPUs live.

Low hiring, low firing, and wages behind prices

Meanwhile, September added just 29,000 US jobs. Unemployment reached 4.2%, and Indeed says the country remains stuck in a “low-hire, low-fire” market. Companies aren't firing everyone, but they're hardly rolling out the red carpet for new hires either.

And it gets worse.

Advertised wages grew 2.4% over the year while consumer prices rose 3.7%. So the salary numbers on job postings are growing slower than the cost of living.

What it means if you're targeting Director or VP roles

For senior tech leaders, the lesson is pretty clear. The market isn't uniformly dead, and it isn't uniformly recovering. Hiring budgets are moving toward specific problems: AI infrastructure, data centers, electrical systems, and the people who can make expensive technology actually work.

If you're looking for Director of Engineering, VP of Infrastructure or Head of Data roles, your positioning needs to reflect the business problems you solve. Reliability, platform scale, cloud costs, AI deployment, security, and operational efficiency are far more useful talking points than a laundry list of tools you've used.

The economy has found enough money to build the AI data centers, but convincing it to hire the humans who need jobs is proving a little harder.

If you have been looking for your next role in this economy, finding a new job is a full-time job on its own. You have to track applications, find the right people who are hiring for your target roles, reach out to them explaining why you're a great candidate and follow up when required.

And once you start landing interviews, interview prep and negotiation get added to your already-full plate. It is very easy to feel overwhelmed when you're doing all of these, but are still not seeing enough traction to get hired. It is easier yet to let someone handle all of this, which is exactly what my team does.