71% of new dev jobs are senior
Software developer job postings are up about 15% since February 2025.
That number is doing a lot of work, and most of it is hiding something.
Indeed's Hiring Lab ran the breakdown on July 8. Between May 2025 and May 2026, 71% of the increase in software development postings came from senior roles. 37% came from jobs with AI in the title. Over that same stretch, total US job postings fell 7%.
Development is one of the few categories growing while everything else contracts. The growth just landed in a very small part of it.
One more number from the same report. Software dev postings are still about 27.5% below February 2020. Overall postings are roughly back to where they were then. Six years on, development is the category that hasn't caught up, and the recovery it's getting sits almost entirely at the top of the ladder.
Here's what that changes about the week.
Client calls. A hiring manager who saw the headline thinks the dev market is flooded. They expect 200 applicants on a mid-level req and they price the role accordingly. The 15% didn't happen at mid-level. If you can put the split in front of them, you get a real conversation about comp instead of an argument about it.
Search strings. 37% of the new postings carry AI in the title. Titles are moving underneath us. AI engineer, ML platform engineer, applied AI engineer, forward deployed engineer. If your string is still anchored on "software engineer" plus a stack list, you're skipping people who retitled themselves in the last 18 months, and you're skipping reqs that got renamed on the client side. Worth an hour this week to rebuild it.
Candidate calls. Mid-level developers are reading the same headlines we are. They're applying, hearing nothing back, and deciding something's wrong with them. Usually there isn't. Tell them where the openings actually sit and what it would take to get read for one. It's a harder call and a more useful one.
Then there's the squeeze at the other end. If 71% of new postings are senior, every firm in the market is working the same shortlist. Those people don't show up on page one of a search, they're not applying anywhere, and they answer maybe one message a month. Sourcing past the obvious was always the job. This year it's the whole job.
What we keep coming back to is that the 15% is real and almost nobody is hiring inside it. The people it describes are senior, or they have AI in the title, or both.
That's a narrow door. Worth knowing which side of it your req sits on before you post it.
One caveat we'd put on the whole thing: this is posting data, not hiring data. A posting is a company saying it wants someone. It's the earliest signal we get and it's a real one, but the gap between a live req and a signed offer has been wide for two years now. We treat the 15% as a measure of intent.
Still, intent is what we're sourcing against. If a client is only writing senior reqs, that's what we're building pipeline for, whether or not those reqs all close.
If you've got a dev search that's been open too long, send us the title and the level. We'll tell you what we're seeing on that profile right now.