AWS tops US tech hiring data as cloud dominates 850k job ads

An analysis of roughly 850,000 US technology job postings published between January 2025 and March 2026 by web intelligence firm Oxylabs has found that cloud platforms and foundational infrastructure tools dominate employer demand, with Amazon Web Services appearing in nearly one in three listings.

AWS led the ranking at 30%, followed by Microsoft Azure at 24%, Git at 21%, Excel at 15%, and Google Cloud Platform at 14%. Kubernetes and Docker each appeared in around 13-14% of postings, with Power BI, Terraform and Tableau rounding out the top ten. Taken together, 42% of all postings required knowledge of at least one of the three major hyperscaler platforms, and AWS and Azure were co-mentioned in 15% of listings.

What the data shows

Breaking down tool categories, Oxylabs found that Data Storage and Infrastructure tools, primarily the three cloud platforms, accounted for 47% of all tool mentions across the dataset. DevOps and Developer Experience tooling, led by Git and encompassing Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform, represented 30%. Business Intelligence and Analytics tools, including Power BI, Tableau and Looker, made up 18%, with Data Ingestion and Transformation tools such as dbt, Kafka and Fivetran at 4%, and Orchestration and Observability tools at 1%.

Software engineering roles represented the largest share of postings at 38%, followed by Data Science and AI/ML at 14%, Tech and Engineering Management at 14%, and DevOps and Cloud roles at 12%.

Andrius Kuksta, Tech Lead in the Oxylabs R&D team, said the findings broadly confirm industry intuition but reveal sharper skews than survey-based rankings typically capture. "Cloud platforms and DevOps tooling dominate job ads even more heavily than survey-based rankings suggest, while some high-visibility skills appearing less often than you might think," he said. He cautioned practitioners against chasing trending tools before mastering cloud fundamentals specific to their target role.

Hiring activity accelerated significantly in the first quarter of 2026, which accounted for 39% of all postings in the dataset, 3.7 times the volume recorded in Q1 2025. The report does not attribute the jump to a single cause, though it coincides with broader discussion of AI-driven productivity and cautious restarting of headcount after a period of layoffs across major technology employers.

Regional and sector patterns

Geographically, California led on total volume at 13% of postings, followed by Texas at 8% and New York at 5%. Virginia, however, posted nearly three times as many tech roles per capita as the national average, a pattern the report attributes to the state's dense concentration of data centres serving hyperscaler operators. Azure took the lead over AWS across a cluster of Upper Midwest and Southern states, including Minnesota, Indiana and Tennessee, reflecting enterprise ties in manufacturing and healthcare that have historically favoured Microsoft's ecosystem.

Outside core technology businesses, which generated 45% of all listings, professional services accounted for 17% of demand and finance and manufacturing each contributed 8%.

Market context

The findings are consistent with broader signals from cloud provider earnings, where infrastructure and platform services continue to post double-digit revenue growth. The persistence of Excel in 15% of postings, ahead of Kubernetes and Docker, underscores a gap between the tools that generate conference-talk buzz and those embedded in day-to-day enterprise workflows. For enterprise buyers and workforce planners, the implication is that cloud platform proficiency is now effectively a baseline credential rather than a differentiator.

The report is based on public job listings scraped using Oxylabs' own proxy and web-intelligence tools, which is a methodology the company has a commercial interest in showcasing. Readers should apply standard caveats about vendor-produced research, though the underlying dataset size and the transparency of the methodology note are reasonable mitigating factors.