The UK software market is cautious but far from flat. Against a subdued 2025 backdrop, businesses took a careful approach to hiring, yet there were clear demand hotspots for specialist skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026. That split matters: the roles a scaling team needs most are the ones still in demand.
The wider labour market is best described as 'low hire, low fire', with weaker recruitment but only slight increases in redundancies, and vacancies sitting below pre-pandemic levels the Low Pay Commission's 2025 report. Even so, professional, scientific and technical activities saw the largest volume increase in vacancies in the August to October 2025 period, up by 5,000 according to ONS vacancy figures for November 2025.
Demand for AI skills tells the sharpest story. It rose by nearly 200% in a year, with London accounting for 80% of AI-related job postings and nearly two-thirds of all technology vacancies in the UK Accenture data reported by The Register. For a growth engineer, whose job is to build and measure what moves the numbers, that overlap with data and AI is where the market is heading.
A growth engineer sits between product, data and engineering, so hiring one means understanding how each of those markets behaves. The entry-level picture is tight: UK entry-level job postings have dropped by 30% since ChatGPT launched, with graduates facing the toughest market since 2018 as techUK reports. The UK tech sector also cut graduate jobs by 46% in a year, with a further 53% drop projected according to Institute of Student Employers figures via The Register.
That squeeze pushes teams toward experienced hires, but the gap is uneven. In engineering, entry-level hiring has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a nine-percentage-point gap per a GOV.UK snapshot of entry-level hiring. So the experienced people a growth team wants are exactly the people every other team wants too.
There is one advantage worth naming. For the engineering profession, the vast majority of new hires come from the resident labour force, which means low reliance on international recruitment as GOV.UK's review of IT and engineering professionals shows. And skills routes are widening: apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 according to the DSIT AI Labour Market Survey 2025. Both point to a domestic pool you can build from, not just buy in.
Start with the outcome, not the title. A growth engineer role blurs product, data and engineering, so write the brief around what you need moved: activation, retention, conversion, or the experiment velocity behind them. Because specialist skills in AI, data and enterprise applications are the demand hotspots Computer Weekly's outlook confirms, be precise about which of those your team actually uses day to day.
Speed is your quiet advantage in a low-hire market. When strong people are scarce, the team that replies within hours and books the first conversation the same week tends to win. Build a short, clear process, keep the feedback loop tight, and treat every interview as a two-way sell.
When you need the right growth engineer quickly, we search a database of 15 million people, rank a shortlist in seconds, and manage the process from first contact to a booked interview. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If you're scaling a software team this year, tell Reed.ai the outcome you need and we'll start the search today.
