What ~5,000 Open Tech Jobs Told Us: A September 2026 Snapshot

In September 2026 we took a snapshot of every open job on the boards Hot Jobs checked at the time: the career pages of 47 tech companies on Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby, plus the Remotive and Himalayas remote boards. (Hot Jobs now checks 390+ company career pages; the numbers below are from that earlier snapshot.) That came to 4,963 open postings. Here is what the snapshot showed about which roles were open to remote work, what it suggests for your own search, and where its limits are.

First, the caveats

Read every number below with these in mind:

• One moment in time. This is a single snapshot from September 2026. Jobs open and close every day; a week later the counts would be different.
• Only these boards. 47 companies and two remote boards. Not LinkedIn, not local job sites, not Telegram channels, not companies on other hiring systems. This is not the job market as a whole.
• A tech-heavy sample. The companies are mostly software, infrastructure and fintech businesses, such as Datadog, GitLab, Cloudflare, Vercel, Monzo and SumUp. The role mix reflects that.
• Small numbers are noisy. A difference between 3 and 4 postings means nothing.
• Sorting is imperfect. Putting postings into 25 roles and reading free-text location fields will never be exact. Some postings land in the wrong bucket, and one posting can fit more than one role, so the role counts do not add up to a total.

With that said, a few patterns were clear enough to be useful.

Remote from Europe is a small slice

Out of 4,963 open postings, the largest role bucket, Software Engineer, had 73 postings open to remote work from Europe. The rest of the total is made up of on-site and hybrid jobs, remote jobs tied to other regions, and roles outside the 25 we track.

Here is how selected roles compared:

For most roles, the any-region column is clearly larger than the Europe column. In practice this means many remote postings are remote within one specific region, and that region is written in the location field, not in the job title.

The answer is in the location field

These are real location strings from postings in the snapshot. They show why the word "remote" alone tells you little:

• "Remote - US", "United States (Remote)", "USA Only"
• "Remote - EMEA", "Europe", "Worldwide"
• "Remote or In-Office in San Francisco"
• "Vilnius • Kaunas • remote • Hybrid • FullTime"

The last one contains the word "remote" and is still a hybrid role in two Lithuanian cities. On Himalayas, which lists only remote jobs, the location field is the region the job is open to, which makes it easier to read. We go through this in detail in finding remote IT jobs open to Europe.

Some roles exist, just not remotely

Product Owner and Technical Writer had zero remote postings in both columns. But Product Owner roles did exist in the snapshot: they were hybrid in Vilnius and Kaunas. They would only reach people who added those cities to their search.

If your role looks empty on remote filters, add the specific cities you would actually move to or commute to. For why it also helps to search both titles, see Product Owner vs Product Manager.

Solutions Engineering is bigger than you might expect

Solutions / Sales Engineer was the second-largest bucket open to Europe (48), ahead of Backend (46) and Product Manager (38). These are customer-facing technical roles: demos, integrations, proofs of concept. On boards full of companies that sell software to other businesses, that makes sense. If you are an engineer who enjoys working with customers, it is a title worth adding.

Frontend: small numbers, big gap

Frontend had 3 postings open to Europe against 19 remote in any region. With numbers this small we would not read much into it; it could simply be the week. It is still a reminder to track adjacent titles. Full-Stack, for example, had 21 postings open to Europe.

Design, writing and research were thin

Product Designer (4), UX Researcher (1) and Graphic Designer (1) were rare in the Europe column, and Technical Writer was at zero. That is what you would expect from engineering-heavy company boards, and it says little about the design market in general. We wrote about where designers can look in job alerts for designers.

AI roles: present, not dominant

AI Engineer (9) and Machine Learning (14) sat in the middle of the list for Europe. Titles in this area vary a lot; we cover them in AI Engineer, ML Engineer and other AI job titles.

What to take from this

• Read the location line before anything else.
• Track two or three adjacent titles, not one.
• If remote-only looks empty for your role, add real cities.
• Treat any single count as a snapshot, not a trend.

Hot Jobs filters these same boards by the roles you pick and the regions you can work from, so a "Remote - US" posting does not reach someone who chose Europe. €3 once, no subscription. Connect the bot