VILNIUS, Lithuania –- The U.S. labor market has recently posted its worst monthly numbers in over a year. But for tech professionals wondering where to invest their time, the skills employers want haven’t changed.
A new analysis by Oxylabs, a web intelligence company, examined roughly 850,000 U.S. tech job postings published between January 2025 and March 2026. The finding: cloud platforms and foundational infrastructure tools – not the buzziest skills on social media – dominate hiring requirements.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) appears in 30% of all postings. It is followed by Microsoft Azure (24%), Git (21%), Excel (15%), Google Cloud Platform or GCP (14%), Kubernetes (14%), Docker (13%), Power BI (9%), Terraform (8%), and Tableau (7%).
Nearly 42% of all analyzed postings required knowledge of at least one major cloud platform. AWS and Azure also emerged as the most co-mentioned duo, appearing together in 15% of job descriptions.
The report highlights a market heavily weighted toward infrastructure, with cloud platforms accounting for 47% of all tool mentions, followed by DevOps tooling at 30% and business intelligence at 18%.
“The picture we saw after analyzing close to a million job postings largely confirms what experienced developers would guess – cloud, infrastructure, and data skills are in high demand. Where it gets more interesting is in the proportions: cloud platforms and DevOps tooling dominate job ads even more heavily than survey-based rankings suggest, while some high-visibility skills (the ones trending on X or headlining conference talks) appear less often than you might think,” said Andrius Kūkšta, tech lead at Oxylabs.
Data Infrastructure Beats Online Hype
Despite ongoing tech layoffs, hiring activity rose sharply earlier this year, with the first quarter of 2026 accounting for 39% of all listings in the dataset – 3.7 times more activity than the same period a year earlier.
Software engineering roles represented the largest share of posting volume at 38%, followed by Data Science and AI/ML at 14%, Tech and Engineering Management at 14%, and DevOps and Cloud roles at 12%.
The distribution of tool requirements across function categories reveals a market that is heavily weighted toward infrastructure and deployment, with more specialized data and analytics skills concentrated in narrower segments of the workforce.
Looking at the five broad tool categories analyzed, Data Storage and Infrastructure tools – primarily cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP – account for 47% of all tool mentions across tech job postings. DevOps and Developer Experience tools, led by Git and including Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform, represent 30%.
Business Intelligence and Analytics tools – Power BI, Tableau, and Looker – account for 18%. Data Ingestion and Transformation tools such as dbt, Fivetran, Kafka, and Airbyte make up just 4%, while Orchestration and Observability tools like Airflow represent 1%.
“Chasing the most ‘advanced’ or talked-about tools without building cloud fundamentals first is a risky strategy. The data suggests professionals should first identify their target role category, then master the toolset specific to that path,” said Kūkšta.
Regional Patterns and Industry Demand
Geographically, California led total posting volume at 13%, followed by Texas at 8% and New York at 5%. However, Virginia stood out by posting nearly three times as many tech jobs per capita as the national average, driven by its massive concentration of data centers serving major cloud providers.
While AWS was the top-requested cloud platform across the majority of states, Azure took the lead across a specific cluster of Upper Midwest and Southern states, including Minnesota, Indiana, and Tennessee, reflecting regional enterprise ties in manufacturing and healthcare.
Outside of the core tech sector, which generated 45% of all listings, professional services accounted for 17% of hiring demand, followed by finance and manufacturing at 8% each. Media and entertainment also emerged as an active recruiter for cloud-native talent, relying heavily on AWS and Git for digital production pipelines.
The full research report is available here.
About the Expert
Andrius Kūkšta is a Tech Lead in the R&D team at Oxylabs. Over more than eight years there, he has progressed through roles including Analyst, Software Engineer, ML Engineer, Data Engineer, and R&D Engineer. He has contributed to several core products and is the author or co-author of five patents based on Oxylabs technologies. His work focuses on the latest AI and emerging technologies, translating trends into practical solutions. Outside of work, he is involved in sports analytics for the basketball club Žalgiris Kaunas.
