The picture is cautious at the entry level and steadier higher up. In engineering, entry-level hiring has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a 9-percentage-point gap GOV.UK's 2026 snapshot of entry-level hiring. That gap tells you where the appetite is. Teams are prioritising people who can land and make an impact quickly, which matters when a Postgres-first stack puts data design and query performance at the centre of the system.
Demand is also concentrating around specialist skills. Against a subdued 2025 economic backdrop, businesses took a cautious approach to hiring but there were demand hotspots for specialist tech skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security Computer Weekly's 2026 tech recruitment outlook. Data sits right in that hotspot, and Postgres is often the engine behind it.
When Postgres becomes the default store for application data, analytics and sometimes queues and search, the roles that design and run it carry more weight. That pulls hiring towards people who understand data modelling, indexing and operations, not only framework fluency.
The wider demand signals back this up. IT business analysts, architects and systems designers (193k workers) are among the occupations in critical demand, with 3 out of 5 indicators in critical demand in 2025 the Occupations in Demand 2025 release on GOV.UK. These are exactly the people who shape how a Postgres-first system is structured and scaled.
Retention is the other half of the story. 79% of UK technical professionals plan to change employers in 2026, according to recruitment firm Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report surveying over 500 employers and 1000 candidates Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report, via the IET. When nearly four in five people are open to moving, the skilled database and backend engineers you want are already within reach, and so are yours.
Start with the problem, not the keyword. A Postgres-first stack rewards people who think in data: schema design, normalisation choices, indexing, and the trade-offs between a single relational store and extra moving parts. Write the role around those outcomes so you attract engineers who have run systems, not just read about them.
Test for real work. Swap trivia for a short, practical exercise: review a slow query, propose an index, or sketch a schema for a given use case. You learn more about how someone reasons under real constraints than any whiteboard puzzle can tell you.
Speed and clarity win. With so many professionals open to a move, a tidy process and fast feedback are often the difference between hiring the right person and losing them to a quicker team.
We built Reed.ai to make that fast, focused hiring simple. We search a database of 15 million candidates to surface people who fit your Postgres-first role, then manage the process end to end. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If you are hiring backend engineers this year, tell us what good looks like and we will start building your shortlist today.
