Whether you’re a company seeking to fill a critical engineering position or a potential candidate looking to sharpen your technical skills, it’s critical to pay attention to trends in hiring. Knowing what skills are most in demand gives everyone the knowledge to find, or fill, the right job. And finding a perfect match benefits all. Here’s what we are seeing is hot right now:

• Experienced front end engineers are in high demand, particularly those who build responsive, single page applications and those with experience in modern JavaScript frameworks like React.js and AngularJS
• Back-end engineers remain consistently in high demand, especially those who build web applications, web services, platforms, and infrastructure that can handle a lot of scaling. Experience with microservices has also become more in-demand. Java continues to be popular, but we’ve seen an increased need for engineers with Python, Node.js, Scala, and Go experience. PHP continues to decrease in popularity, and Ruby on Rails is no longer as popular as it once was.
• Demand for Data engineers is higher than ever – engineers who can build systems to handle massive amounts of data processing and analytics and anyone who can build data pipelines or data infrastructure are highly appealing. Aside from Java and Scala experience, Data Engineers should have solid experience with big data tools like Hadoop, Kafka, and Spark.
• More companies are starting to look for Full stack engineers – developers who can work on both the backend and the frontend of the tech stack. While most engineers tend to skew one way or the other, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the needs of the entire system.
• Interest in Machine Learning experience is increasing as many companies are turning to Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Natural Language Processing techniques to help them explore and leverage data in incredible new ways.

Other areas that have picked up dramatically in the last year include companies innovating in the Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) space. While these skills are still on the rise and not necessarily highly desired yet, it’s definitely an area to keep an eye on. Containerization, which is a lightweight version of virtualization (virtual machines), is also picking up steam as technologies like Docker become more popular.