Whether AI is already replacing jobs is a subject of intense debate.
According to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, May saw the highest number of tech layoffs in a single month in years, with AI being the most cited reason.
In theory, software engineering is the specialty most susceptible to automation, given the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools. But researchers at venture firm Signalfire say hiring data tells a different story.
“The rationale for a lot of the layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically AI around code,” said Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire. “What we’re seeing on the ground is a little contradictory to that.”
SignalFire’s analysis, which tracked the careers of millions of employees at more than 80 million companies, suggests that engineering was the most resilient job role in 2025. Instead of focusing on layoffs, which are difficult to track because employment status updates are often delayed after layoffs, SignalFire looked at hiring data as a more accurate indicator of real-time workforce trends.
According to SignalFire’s latest State of Talent Report, while the total number of jobs across major technology companies declined by 25% compared to 2019 levels, the decline for engineering jobs was much smaller at just 11%.
In fact, at 12 companies that Signal Fire classified as “tech majors” – Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe – 55% of all new hires in 2025 were engineers. This is a significant increase from 2019, when only 46% of new hires were engineers, the report said.
The continued need for engineers is even more pronounced among early-stage startups, which will hire 7% more engineers in 2025 than in 2019, according to SignalFire data.
If AI were to truly replace engineering talent, Bantock argued that engineers would be the first to decline in the current decline in technology employment. Instead, SignalFire data shows engineering headcount is growing faster than most other jobs in the technology industry.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and unemployment could reach 20%, but Peter McCrory, the company’s head of economics, told TechCrunch in March that he has not yet seen a significant impact from AI on the workforce.
McCrory said at the time that there was “at least no significant difference in unemployment rates” between workers who use Claude for “the most core tasks of their jobs in an automated manner,” such as technical writers, data entry clerks, and software engineers, and workers whose jobs require “physical interaction with the real world and dexterity” and have less contact with AI.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went further and completely shot down the theory that AI will replace engineers. “Someone said AI was going to destroy all software engineering jobs,” Huang said in an interview at Stanford Graduate School of Business in April. And he claimed that the opposite was true. With all of Nvidia’s engineers now using agent AI, “software engineers are busier than ever,” he said.
Huang added that while agents write code almost instantly, engineers are constantly encouraged to come up with the “next idea.”
At least for now, AI-powered engineering seems to be a classic example of the Jevons paradox. In other words, the idea is that increased efficiency does not reduce demand for resources. It increases as work expands to fill new capacities. Commenting on the current engineering talent, Bantock said: “Their productivity suddenly increases significantly and there is an endless amount of work to do.”
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