What are employers actually asking for right now?

We looked at 74,395 postings from 9,836 employers, and the clearest answer is that employers are asking for a mix of cloud, data, and AI skills while leaving many practical details out. The biggest gap is not just what they want, but what they do not say: salary, sponsorship, and work-authorisation are silent in most adverts.

The headline: skills matter more than the rest of the advert

The most requested skill is AWS, which appears in 12,744 postings. Python follows in 10,972, then SQL in 8,021 and Salesforce in 7,676. After that comes Agile in 5,321 and LLM in 5,238.

That mix matters because it shows demand is not narrowing to a single technical stack. Employers want cloud platforms, data handling, and practical application skills together. AI is part of that picture, but it is not the whole of it.

Top skills in the postings

The clearest pattern is that the list is balanced between cloud infrastructure, programming, data, and enterprise systems. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all rank highly. Python and SQL remain core. LLM is already among the most requested skills, which shows that AI-related demand is now visible in real job advertising, not just in speculation.

AI is requested, but still not dominant

AI or LLM skills appear in 6,060 postings, which is 8.1% of the total. That is enough to matter, but it is still far from universal. Most employers are not asking for AI specifically.

That tells job seekers something useful: AI skills are an advantage in a sizeable minority of roles, especially in technical and product-oriented work, but they are not yet the main requirement across the market. If someone is deciding where to spend learning time, the safer bet is still to combine AI knowledge with the older and broader skills that appear more often: cloud, Python, SQL, and systems work.

Salary is still missing from most postings

Only 29,304 postings state a salary. That means 39.4% are transparent on pay, while 45,091 do not state one at all. In other words, 60.6% leave pay unmentioned.

This is one of the most important findings in the data. A person choosing where to apply still has to work around pay silence in most adverts. Salary transparency is present in a minority, not the majority.

Salary by seniority

Senior and lead roles are more likely to state pay than many people expect, but the highest shares sit at Staff and VP. Director roles also stand out. By contrast, internships and C-level roles are relatively unlikely to state salary.

That means salary visibility is not simply a matter of seniority rising. It varies by level. If you are targeting senior specialist roles, pay is not guaranteed to be shown, but it is common enough to be worth filtering for. If you are targeting staff or VP roles, salary is more often present.

Remote is the default, not the exception

Remote roles account for 41,309 postings, or 55.5% of the total. Hybrid roles make up 4,065, and on-site roles 3,313.

That means the strongest pattern in location is not office-based work, but distributed work. Employers are still hiring in many forms, but remote is the most common setup by a wide margin.

For job seekers, that changes how you read the market. If you only search for local office roles, you are leaving out a large share of the postings. If you need flexibility, the market already supports that preference in most of the visible adverts.

Employment types

Full-time work dominates, and contract work is the next clearest category by a long way. Unknown employment type is also substantial, which means a meaningful number of adverts still leave basic job structure unclear.

Work authorisation and sponsorship are mostly unstated

Only 3,257 postings say they require work authorisation. That is 4.4% of the total. A much larger 71,138 say nothing about it at all, which is 95.6%.

Visa sponsorship is even quieter. Only 768 postings offer sponsorship, while 2,096 say they will not sponsor. The remaining 71,531 say nothing about sponsorship.

This silence is important because it affects who can act on a role at all. Someone needing sponsorship cannot assume that silence means support. The data says the opposite: silence is the norm, not the exception.

Sponsorship by country

The country tables show the same pattern in different places: most adverts do not address sponsorship at all. The US has the largest volume by far, so its totals drive much of the overall picture. But even there, sponsorship is mentioned in only a small share of postings.

Salaries vary a lot by country

Salary visibility is not evenly distributed across countries. In the US, 20,415 postings state a salary, which is 53.9% of US postings. Canada is even higher at 59.1%, while the GB figure is 33.9%.

At the other end, India stands out for low salary disclosure at 5.3%. Japan is also very low at 4.5%. Germany sits at 20.0%, and Spain at 20.5%.

Salary by country

The practical takeaway is simple: the usefulness of salary filtering depends on where the role is based. If you are applying across countries, some markets are far more transparent than others.

The largest employers show different habits

The biggest employer by volume is Amazon.com Services LLC with 4,616 postings, but only 23 of those state a salary. That is a share of 0.5%.

Other large employers are much more transparent. NVIDIA states salary in 1,410 of 2,516 postings, or 56.0%. Adobe does so in 578 of 855, or 67.6%. Anthropic is even higher at 88.5%. mercor states salary in 1,168 of 1,173 postings, or 99.6%.

Largest employers

This is one of the clearest signs that employer behaviour varies sharply. Some large employers leave pay out of almost everything. Others include it in most of their postings. For a job seeker, that means the employer name itself can be a clue to how much information is likely to be visible before applying.

What the market is actually asking for

If you strip the data down to the most repeated signals, employers are asking for cloud, Python, SQL, enterprise platforms, and now AI-related skills. They are also mostly asking without giving full information back.

That gives job seekers two concrete moves.

First, if you are building or updating your skills, prioritise the combination that appears most often: cloud plus Python plus SQL, then add AI or LLM knowledge if you want to reach the part of the market that is already asking for it.

Second, when you search, treat missing information as data. Salary, sponsorship, and work-authorisation details are absent from most postings. If those matter to you, use filters that surface the adverts where they are actually stated.

Jobee is designed to show you those patterns quickly, so you can spend less time guessing and more time applying where the requirements match your situation.