Data shows what the 100 most in-demand engineers optimize for in their next role
nathanbenaich · x · 2026-10-02
Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital shared data from engineer hiring platform Jackandjillai comparing what the top 100 most in-demand engineers optimize for in their next role versus the rest of the network.
The top engineers prioritize:
- hard technical problems
- frontier labs, elite firms and quant shops
- the best infrastructure and distributed systems work
- staying hands-on
A useful signal both for companies trying to attract elite engineering talent and for engineers thinking about career direction.
More from Companies & People
- TCL builds AI-native AC factory: $297M, 2,000+ agents, one unit every 7 seconds — nordicinst · 2026-10-02
- Fields medalist Jacob Tsimerman founds Mathematical AI Safety Institute, joins OpenAI — nordicinst · 2026-10-02
- Physicist-Turned-DL Researcher Joins AMLab, University of Amsterdam as Faculty — saramagliacane · 2026-10-02
- Ex-DeepMind researcher argues LLMs still lack auditable reasoning, calls for AlphaGo-style rethink — ThoreG · 2026-10-02
- Microsoft gutted its partner channel and lost the developer community, dev argues — pswider · 2026-10-02
- Mozilla bets on Firefox 157 Nova redesign to win users back from Google — gnukeith · 2026-10-02