Engineering market intelligence

Signals

2026-09-14 → 2026-09-21 · Momentum 2026-W39 vs 2026-W38 · Radar v33 → v34 · 7,169 postings
Issue
#004
Converging signal of the week
● CONVERGING

Docker — search interest and hiring demand agree

65.4 +8.0momentum score ↑
+55.0search interest (0–100 scale) ↑
12% +3.1%share of postings ↑

Market scoreboard

AreaPostingsShare of week (Δ)Median pay (local)Top skill
🎨 Frontend3645% +0.5%$112.5kjavascript
⚙️ Backend1,34519% +2.9%€51.0kpython
☁️ Platform & Cloud2,11129% -1.9%€42.5kdevops
🤖 Data & AI1,37319% +0.2%$167.5kai/ml
🧑‍💼 Management & Leadership70910% +0.9%$175.0kscrum
🧩 Everything else1,26718% -2.6%£56.0ksecurity
+2.9%Backend share of postings, the week's biggest gain
-2.6%Everything else share, the week's biggest fall
46% <span style="color:#147a4b;font-size:13px;">+6.7%</span>TypeScript share of Frontend postings

Postings is a count; share is that count against the week's total, and the ± figure is that share's movement in percentage points — not a change in hiring volume. Total postings this window: 7,169 against 17,399 (-59%) — ingestion volume, not the market, which is exactly why this column is a share. Pay is each section's own dominant currency — real medians, but not comparable down the column.

💻 Software Engineering

🎨 Frontend
46% +6.7%TypeScript
5% -4.6%Next.js
14% +3.4%Vue
⚠ this section's postings fell 54% week over week, so these shares moved on a smaller base

364 postings · Software Engineer (27%), Frontend Engineer (26%)

Skills: JavaScript 211 · React 199 · TypeScript 169

Pay

$70,000$112,500 median$182,500
middle half of 24 postings that quoted a salary

Movers

Read: Cost-Effective Public Hosting for Typescript/MySQL Monorepo: Optimizing for Small User Base Without Unnecessary Expenses · Ditching WebSockets: Server-Sent Events in Next.js 📡 · I Built an Adaptive Hand Cricket Game Using React, MediaPipe, and TensorFlow.js
⚙️ Backend
38% +10.7%Python
25% -7.2%Java
9% +4.1%Redis
⚠ this section's postings fell 51% week over week, so these shares moved on a smaller base

1,345 postings · Backend Engineer (32%), Software Engineer (26%)

Skills: Python 514 · Kubernetes 458 · AI/ML 362

Pay

€37,000€51,000 median€51,000
middle half of 92 postings that quoted a salary

Movers

  • Django 64.6 (+18.2) — article coverage
  • Flask 70.1 (+18.2) — article coverage
  • Fiber 54.0 (+15.7) — search interest
Read: Saving another 100TB of RAM with math (and Rust) · My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it · Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

☁️ Platform & Cloud

25% +6.8%AWS
28% -4.8%Azure
18% +4.5%Docker
⚠ this section's postings fell 61% week over week, so these shares moved on a smaller base

2,111 postings · DevOps Engineer (17%), Software Engineer (16%)

Skills: DevOps 1,151 · Kubernetes 678 · Azure 592

Pay

€42,500€42,500 median€56,854
middle half of 167 postings that quoted a salary

Movers

  • Kubernetes 68.1 (+15.7) — search interest
  • Observability 68.5 (+14.6) — search interest
Read: Kubernetes v1.37: Memory QoS Graduates to Beta · Digital Experience Monitoring with Grafana Cloud: Session Replay, synthetic checks, and faster investigations · I Stopped Managing Servers Manually — Understanding Docker, Amazon ECR, ECS & Fargate

🤖 Data & AI

2% -1.3%dbt
4% +1.0%PyTorch
⚠ this section's postings fell 58% week over week, so these shares moved on a smaller base

1,373 postings · Software Engineer (21%), AI Engineer (19%)

Skills: AI/ML 1,252 · Security 428 · Python 361

Pay

$125,000$167,500 median$215,000
middle half of 147 postings that quoted a salary

Radar

Read: You’re Probably Using Claude Code Wrong · Stop letting AI agents ship 'shell script' Python

🧑‍💼 Management & Leadership

5% -3.6%Scrum
⚠ this section's postings fell 55% week over week, so these shares moved on a smaller base

709 postings · Product Manager (25%), Engineering Manager (24%)

Skills: AI/ML 242 · Security 162 · DevOps 96

Pay

$128,560$175,000 median$205,600
middle half of 90 postings that quoted a salary

🧩 Everything else

14% +3.1%Security
⚠ this section's postings fell 64% week over week, so these shares moved on a smaller base

1,267 postings · Software Engineer (46%), Full Stack Engineer (5%)

Skills: Security 174 · C++ 25 · iOS 21

Pay

£38,510£56,000 median£70,000
middle half of 93 postings that quoted a salary

Movers

  • Composer 76.6 (+28.6) — article coverage
  • Apicurio Registry 26.5 (+22.5) — search interest
  • Dependency Injection 54.3 (+20.3) — article coverage

Radar

Read: I don't like passkeys · Swift 6.4 Released · LispBM: Concurrent Lisp for Microcontrollers

Also converging

TypeScript

● CONVERGING
77.5 +17.0momentum score ↑
+54.4article coverage (0–100 scale) ↑
46% +6.7%share of postings ↑

Contradictions

Redis

● CONTESTED
57.7 -9.6momentum score ↓
-75.0article coverage (0–100 scale) ↓
9% +4.1%share of postings ↑

Azure

● CONTESTED
62.6 +7.2momentum score ↑
+48.0search interest (0–100 scale) ↑
28% -4.8%share of postings ↓

Python

● CONTESTED
80.9 +6.6momentum score ↑
-12.2article coverage (0–100 scale) ↓
19% +5.0%share of postings ↑

Next.js

● CONTESTED
46.3 +5.8momentum score ↑
+22.1article coverage (0–100 scale) ↑
5% -4.6%share of postings ↓

Java

● CONTESTED
75.8 +5.7momentum score ↑
+30.0search interest (0–100 scale) ↑
25% -7.2%share of postings ↓

One source only

SignalMovementWhat moved it
Composer+28.6article coverage +75.0
Apicurio Registry+22.5search interest +90.0
Dependency Injection+20.3article coverage +75.0
Eleventy+20.3search interest +66.0
Passkeys+20.3article coverage +61.5