The Tech Jobs That Are Safe From AI For Now

 

“It should be a tough time to be a software engineer: Coding is a favorite early artificial-intelligence use case and layoffs are spreading through the tech industry. But job postings in the information-technology and computer-science sector are up and recruiters say companies are hiring again.

 

The catch? They're looking for those at mid and senior levels and other top-tier technical talent who can harness the new powers of AI.

 

"One experienced engineer can have the output of a whole team," says Chris Abbass, chief executive of recruiting firm Talentful, which works with high-growth tech companies. "It's not necessarily about the amount of people they have, it's who they have and where they have them."

 

IT and computer-science job postings are up 14.2% year over year in April 2026, according to online employment marketplace ZipRecruiter, but there is a split in the demand: The share of entry-level job postings in the tech sector has fallen from 8.1% a year ago to 7.4% in April. The share of senior-level job postings, meanwhile, climbed to 43.1% from 38.8%.

 

Cloudflare last week was the latest tech company to announce a wave of job cuts as part of an AI restructuring plan. The move followed earlier layoffs at Meta Platforms and Coinbase. Block, Jack Dorsey's payments company, laid off 40% of its workforce in February, alluding to AI tools.

 

Abbass says a lot of midlevel managers are being laid off but companies are still looking for more-experienced engineers to work as individual contributors. Because AI still makes a lot of coding errors, they can serve as quality assurance. Plus they can manage a team of AI agents, in theory boosting productivity.

 

Demand for other technical roles is bubbling up, too, he adds, including in AI operations and AI maintenance. Employers also are hiring solutions engineers, who implement AI and act as technical consultants. To Abbass, a clear sign the labor market is improving is when people start trying to poach his own recruiters, and that has been happening as of late.

 

"It's an interesting paradox," says Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer at the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "People that can use artificial intelligence to build programs and connect different parts of your company and do all these services with the help of AI coding are in higher demand than ever because they can do so much so quickly."

 

Aaron Levie, CEO of the cloud-services provider Box, says he sees some tech companies hiring more engineers while others are reducing their workforces. But among Box customers -- which span a variety of industries -- he is seeing demand for new types of technical roles.

 

"AI is quite complicated to implement," he says. "You can be sure that every bank, every pharmaceutical company, every healthcare company, every manufacturer is going to be hiring a ton of people to go implement agents."

 

He recently wrote on X about a new role on the rise, one he is currently hiring for internally, someone who can wire up AI systems throughout a company's technical infrastructure.

 

"In some cases this person may understand the business process well enough to do it fully, but in most cases I expect them to work with the business directly in an embedded fashion," he wrote.

 

Preliminary ZipRecruiter research shows that when it comes to roles that require AI expertise, companies are emphasizing a need for soft skills like communication and collaboration, says Nicole Bachaud, ZipRecruiter's labor economist.

 

"As AI handles background tasks, the core functions of these technology roles are becoming more interpersonal and human-focused," she adds.

 

Engineers without AI-specific skills are still struggling to find work, even if they have got many years of overall experience, according to Victor Janulaitis, CEO of IT employment consulting firm Janco Associates.

 

Many of the unemployed people with tech experience "tend to be legacy individuals or people getting close to retirement age," he says. "The few people that are being hired are people that have done something in AI before and have a proven track record." That said, he does expect the IT job market to grow for the first time since the post-Covid slump, if the Iran conflict ends by August.

 

At least one major player is bucking this trend: Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman recently said Amazon would be bringing on 11,000 software-engineering interns and early-career employees in 2026, in keeping with previous years. (The remarks were earlier reported by Business Insider.) This is despite the company shedding 16,000 jobs in January.

 

"We still need humans," says Kim Majerus, an AWS vice president of global education. "The 11,000 developers that we're hiring across the company are going to continue to help us enhance what we're doing today."” [1]

 

1. The Tech Jobs That Are Safe From AI For Now. Bindley, Katherine.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 15 May 2026: B1.