Data published today by Oxylabs, covering around 850,000 US job postings between January 2025 and March 2026, shows the extent to which cloud and infrastructure skills dominate employer demand — and how far the gap has grown between what the job market actually requires and what tends to top conference agendas.
After AWS at 30 percent, Microsoft Azure appeared in 24 percent of postings, followed by Git (21 percent), Excel (15 percent), and Google Cloud Platform at 14 percent. Kubernetes and Docker each reached 14 percent and 13 percent respectively. Terraform covered 8 percent of listings, while business intelligence tools Power BI and Tableau appeared in 9 percent and 7 percent of postings.
Infrastructure tools as a category — primarily the major cloud platforms — accounted for 47 percent of all tool mentions across the dataset. DevOps tooling represented 30 percent and business intelligence tools 18 percent.
"The picture we saw after analyzing close to a million job postings largely confirms what experienced developers would guess – cloud, infrastructure, and data skills are in high demand. Where it gets more interesting is in the proportions: cloud platforms and DevOps tooling dominate job ads even more heavily than survey-based rankings suggest, while some high-visibility skills (the ones trending on X or headlining conference talks) appear less often than you might think," said Andrius Kūkšta, Tech Lead at Oxylabs.
Hiring volume itself shifted significantly during the period. The first quarter of 2026 contained 39 percent of all job postings in the dataset — 3.7 times more activity than the equivalent quarter a year earlier, despite ongoing layoff announcements across the sector.
By role type, software engineering held the largest share at 38 percent of postings, ahead of Data Science and AI/ML at 14 percent, Tech and Engineering Management at 14 percent, and DevOps and Cloud roles at 12 percent.
Geography adds further texture. California led total posting volume at 13 percent, followed by Texas (8 percent) and New York (5 percent). Virginia posted nearly three times as many tech jobs per capita as the national average, a figure explained by its concentration of data centres serving the major cloud providers. At the state level, Azure overtook AWS across a cluster of Upper Midwest and Southern states — Minnesota, Indiana, and Tennessee — linked by the research to regional enterprise patterns in manufacturing and healthcare.
"Chasing the most 'advanced' or talked-about tools without building cloud fundamentals first is a risky strategy. The data suggests professionals should first identify their target role category, then master the toolset specific to that path," Kūkšta added.
Outside the technology sector, which generated 45 percent of all listings, professional services accounted for 17 percent of hiring demand, finance and manufacturing at 8 percent each. Media and entertainment emerged as an active recruiter for cloud-native talent, leaning on AWS and Git for digital production infrastructure.
Oxylabs, founded in 2015, is a web intelligence platform and proxy provider based in Vilnius, Lithuania. The analysis used public job posting data collected with the company's own scraping tools.
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