Anthropic has displaced Google and Meta as the most sought-after employer among engineers actively preparing for interviews, according to data from Interviewing.io. Senior AI engineering roles in the US now clear $300K base at the 80th percentile, and AI engineers command higher equity offers than their software engineering counterparts across comparable seniority levels. Meanwhile, large tech companies are running intern intakes at roughly half their pre-2023 volumes, even as overall software engineering recruitment edges upward.
The structural shifts are harder to ignore than the compensation numbers. Frontend and mobile titles are disappearing faster than any other engineering role. Full-stack and AI-adjacent titles are replacing them. Engineering management is getting flatter: fewer managers per engineer, fewer VP and Director of Engineering posts at Big Tech. Workers who stayed at Big Tech after zero interest rates ended in 2023 are staying longer, with average seniority and tenure both rising. The data comes from four sources with unusual access: Interviewing.io, Workforce.ai tracking 1M+ monthly job changes, SignalFire's portfolio intelligence team, and TrueUp scanning open roles across Big Tech and top-tier startups.
The full piece maps where engineers actually land after leaving Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. The destinations diverge sharply by company, and the patterns reveal who is feeding the AI lab talent pipeline and who is producing the most founders. The original also breaks down which companies saw the biggest spikes in interview preparation signups, a leading indicator that tracks layoff announcements with unsettling precision. The full dataset and methodology are worth the read.
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