Software engineering jobs have been the most resilient to the AI revolution and have seen the smallest impact from the spread of AI tools inside tech companies, according to a new report from venture capital firm SignalFire published this week. That runs counter to the common assumption that coding and software roles are among the biggest losers from AI-driven restructuring.
The report comes after a wave of major layoffs across the tech sector. Meta cut 8,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, as part of efficiency efforts linked to huge AI infrastructure spending. Oracle cut 21,000 jobs over the past year in what it described as an AI technology rollout. Israeli company Fiverr also cut about 30% of its staff, 250 people, after moving to an “AI first” structure.
SignalFire’s head of research, אשר בנטוק, told TechCrunch, “The rationale given for many of the layoffs is AI, and the fact that today one engineer can do the work of several engineers. What we see in the field does not match that.” The report is based on data gathered through SignalFire’s AI platform, which tracks the employment status of more than 650 million people across over 80 million organizations on LinkedIn.
For the report, SignalFire examined data from 12 large tech companies, including Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Uber and Tesla, as well as major AI firms and labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, plus early-stage startups. It analyzed hiring and job-change updates, not layoff or resignation notices, because workers do not update those in real time.
The study found that hiring across the 12 large tech companies in 2025 was 25% lower than in 2019, but engineers still accounted for 55% of all new hires, up from 46% in 2019. Early-stage startups hired 7% more engineers than in 2019. The report says that if AI were truly replacing engineers, engineering hiring would have been the first to fall. The sharpest decline was among entry-level roles, with junior-engineer hiring down 65% at large tech firms and 76% at startups versus 2019.
