The big tech hiring shift accelerated by AI is not, primarily, an engineering story. It is a story about every other function around the engineers, and the numbers are stark. Design hiring at major tech companies has fallen 48% since 2019. Product management is down 39%. Marketing has dropped 36%. Engineers, by contrast, are down just 11% over the same period and now account for a larger share of the workforce than at any point in recent years.
The Big Tech Hiring Shift in Numbers
Software engineers make up 55% of hiring at major tech companies today, up from 46% in 2019, according to data gathered by Startup Fortune on SignalFire‘s 2026 State of Talent Report. Overall tech hiring is down 25% from 2019 levels, meaning the engineering share has expanded not because companies are hiring more engineers in absolute terms, but because they are cutting everything else far faster.
The data comes from SignalFire’s Beacon AI platform, which tracks more than 650 million professionals and 80 million organisations, giving the firm an unusually broad view of workforce movements across the industry.
What the headline figures reveal is a deliberate narrowing. The leaner org chart that has emerged from successive rounds of post-pandemic cuts is one built around technical execution, with the specialist support layers that surrounded engineers in the growth years, the designers refining interfaces, the product managers translating strategy into roadmaps, the marketers building the funnel, stripped back considerably.
Where the Talent Is Flowing Instead
The big tech hiring shift looks different at the early stage. Early-stage startups actually hired 7% more engineers in 2025 than they did in 2019, according to the same SignalFire data reported by Startup Fortune, which suggests AI tools are expanding what a small engineering team can accomplish rather than making engineers redundant.
Geography is sharpening too. San Francisco and New York City together now account for 65% of AI engineers, according to SignalFire’s 2025 State of Tech Talent Report. Austin, which had positioned itself as an alternative tech hub during the pandemic relocation wave, has seen startup headcount fall 6%.
The competition for experienced engineers is intensifying at the frontier. Anthropic achieved 80% employee retention, and was pulling talent from DeepMind at an 11-to-1 ratio, according to the SignalFire 2025 report. Those figures reflect how concentrated the war for AI talent has become around a small number of well-capitalised companies.
One group bearing the brunt across the board is new graduates. New grad hiring at Big Tech has fallen more than 50% from pre-pandemic 2019 levels. New graduates now account for just 7% of hires at major tech firms, and new hires overall are down 25% from 2023, the SignalFire 2025 report found. The entry-level pipeline, long the standard route into large tech companies, has narrowed to the point where junior candidates are increasingly competing for a fraction of the roles that existed five years ago.
Taken together, the picture is one of consolidation around a narrow technical core. Companies are spending their hiring budgets on engineers who can build and ship, particularly those with AI and machine learning skills, while deferring or eliminating the surrounding functions they previously treated as essential. Design, product, and marketing have not disappeared, but the data suggests all three are being treated as variable costs in a way that engineering is not.
The early-stage numbers offer one counterpoint: if AI is genuinely multiplying individual engineer productivity, the pressure on non-technical roles at established companies could intensify further as leaner teams prove they can match or exceed the output of larger ones. Whether big tech eventually rebuilds those support functions, or finds that AI can substitute for them, is the question the next hiring cycle will begin to answer.