Where remote engineering still hires, May 2026

A new piece of conventional wisdom landed in 2025: remote work is over. JLL's Q2 2025 US Office Market Dynamics report had the headline number: 54% of Fortune 100 employees subject to full-week office requirements, up from 11% the year before. rolled out a 3-day-in-office mandate. went all the way to 5. and followed. The trade press did the rest.

But the Fortune 100 are 100 employers. We monitor 4,441 of them. Across that index, on the morning of May 7 2026, 4,338 of the 89,517 active engineering postings are tagged remote-eligible. That's 4.8%: a number small enough to confirm the headline ("most jobs are onsite"), big enough to deserve a list of names ("but here are the thousands that aren't"). This is that list.

Who's still hiring

Twenty companies account for about a third of all currently-listed remote-eligible engineering roles in our index.

Company	Active remote engineering postings
	174
	117
	106
	99
	81
	78
	77
	61
	45
	43
	43
	42
	41
	39
	38
	38
	36
	34
	34
	33

A few patterns stand out. Crypto and payments infrastructure is well-represented (, , , ), as are the open-source and devtools shops (, , ). , , , and (just outside the top 20) are big-tech names whose remote-friendly hiring posture doesn't get the press coverage that and 's RTO mandates do. Mid-market SaaS rounds it out: , , , . One name most candidates wouldn't think to check: , a management consultancy with 43 remote engineering roles — a real internal-tech footprint hiding inside a category nobody thinks of as remote-friendly.

What's not on the list is also a story. None of the headline RTO mandators we named in the lede — , , , — carry meaningful remote engineering listings in our index. The mandates and the postings agree.

The geography

Remote isn't location-free. Postings still tag a hiring jurisdiction (timezone bands, work-eligibility, or a payroll entity). Across the 4,338 remote-eligible engineering postings, the distribution of those tags:

Region	Postings
United States	2,277
Canada	431
United Kingdom	259
Spain	218
India	189
Poland	184
Germany	164
Ireland	146
Brazil	132
Mexico	130
Argentina	121

The top of the table is what you'd expect: the US plus the EU pay-transparency belt. The interesting part is the contrast with the rest of the engineering market.

Our index has an India-heavy gravitational center for engineering. Bengaluru alone has 16,941 active engineering postings, more than New York and San Francisco combined. Of those 16,941, just 67 are remote-eligible. That's 0.4%. Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai are similar. Indian engineering hiring is fundamentally an onsite market: the big global tech employers post heavily there, and they post for desks.

The corollary is that remote-eligible engineering isn't competing with the global engineering labor market. It's competing with the slice that happens to be tagged for North American or Western European hiring.

The seniority skew

Of the 4,338 remote-eligible engineering roles, 1,995 (46%) are tagged Senior, another 11% are Staff, 3% Principal, 2% Lead. About 62% of the sample is gated at senior+ levels. Entry-level roles are 0.7%: 31 listings out of 4,338. Internships are 0.5%.

The narrative for years was that remote work would democratize entry-level access to better employers. The data says the opposite is happening. Remote is consolidating around employees a company can already trust to operate without supervision. If you're under 2 years of experience and looking for a remote-first entry-level role in our data, you have approximately 31 listings to apply to, against a backdrop of more than 89,000 engineering openings overall.

31 against more than 89,000. Worth knowing before you build a search strategy.

What stack is being asked for

The skills profile of remote engineering is recognizable, and a little narrower than overall engineering hiring. The percentage of the 4,338 remote-eligible postings that mention each technology:

Skill	Share of remote eng postings
Python	49%
AWS	37%
Kubernetes	27%
SQL	24%
React	23%
TypeScript	22%
Java	19%
Google Cloud	18%
Docker	16%
PostgreSQL	16%
Terraform	14%

This is the cloud-native, Python-and-typed-JavaScript stack: the one that lends itself to async work across timezones. Embedded engineering is sparse, low-level systems are sparse, game development is sparser still. C++ shows up in 10% of postings; Go in 7%; Rust in 6%. Things that need a lab bench, a graphics card on the desk, or a co-located ops team aren't what's getting advertised remote.

If you're optimizing your skills for remote employability, the table above is the one to optimize against.

Salary transparency

31% of remote engineering postings in our index include a parseable salary range. For onsite engineering, that figure is 14%. Remote postings are roughly twice as transparent.

The reason isn't that remote-friendly companies are more virtuous. It's geographic concentration. US states with pay-transparency laws (California, New York, Colorado, Washington, Illinois) and the EU Pay Transparency Directive 2023/970 (member-state transposition due June 7 2026) are exactly where remote engineering is most concentrated. The same reason a posting is remote-tagged is a major reason it's also salary-tagged.

If you want comp upfront, the remote-eligible slice of our index is twice as likely to give it to you on the first read.

What to do with this list

The dataset behind this post is the dataset behind the search. The explore page lets you filter on remote directly and combine with seniority, salary band, and stack — then save the search as your own watchlist. That's the path we'd take if we were the reader.

Three of the country watchlists we maintain happen to sit on top of where the EU remote slice concentrates — UK, Germany, Spain (top three EU geographies in the table above). They include onsite roles too, but they're the closest pre-built lenses on the data that backs this post.

Methodology

• Snapshot date. All counts come from a single Typesense facet query against our job_posting_v1 collection on May 7 2026 at ~13:00 UTC. The is_active=true flag is set by our crawler when a posting was last seen on its source board within delisting tolerances (defined per-ATS in our indexing policy).
• Engineering definition. Postings whose normalized occupation lineage includes any of: software-engineer (with children frontend, backend, fullstack, mobile, embedded, game, AI engineer, research engineer), devops-engineer (with SRE, platform, cloud, release variants), qa-engineer, data-engineer, data-scientist, ml-engineer, data-analyst, data-annotator. Electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering are tagged outside the software/data domain and excluded.
• "Remote-eligible". A posting where our normalized location_types array contains remote. About 28% of those postings also carry an onsite tag, which we read as "remote-eligible with optional HQ access" rather than "remote-only." Strict-remote-only would be a smaller number; we use the broader definition because it matches what a job seeker can actually apply to.
• Seniority tagging. About 64% of remote engineering postings (2,767 of 4,338) carry a normalized seniority tag. Percentages in this post are computed as a share of the full 4,338 — so when we say "0.7% entry-level," the absolute count (31) is firm but the percentage assumes that the 36% of untagged postings have a similar level distribution. They probably skew mid-level (which often goes untagged), which would strengthen the senior-skew claim, not weaken it.
• Coverage caveat. Our index is 4,441 companies. It is not a representative sample of the global labor market: we deliberately track companies in Western Europe, Switzerland, and selected US tech employers, with their global subsidiaries' postings included where the careers page is monitorable. The shape of the data follows that bias.
• The "United States" row. The geography table's US count (2,277) is computed against location_ids ancestors in our location hierarchy — every posting tagged with a US city, state, or "United States" itself rolls up. The other rows in the table are facet counts on location_names directly. The difference matters here because remote postings often tag a US state or city rather than the country root.
• Snapshot, not trend. Our crawler's earliest first_seen_at for a still-active posting is March 9 2026. Postings older than that may exist on source boards but only appear in our index from their first crawl-discovery onwards. We make no trend claims based on this snapshot. During the same 2-month window, 4,233 remote-eligible engineering postings have closed — the market is churning, not stagnant.

References

External sources cited above:

• JLL. U.S. Office Market Dynamics, Q2 2025. The "54% of Fortune 100 / up from 11%" headline. Report landing page: jll.com/en-us/insights/us-office-market-dynamics. Summary coverage: Bisnow, "Majority of Employees at Fortune 100 Firms Now Have 5-Day Office Mandate".
• Amazon. Andy Jassy, "Update on Amazon return-to-office and manager-team ratio," September 16 2024 — the memo announcing the five-day-in-office mandate. aboutamazon.com.
• Microsoft. Three-day-in-office mandate announced September 2025, phased rollout starting February 23 2026 (Puget Sound first). Coverage with primary-source detail: GeekWire, "Microsoft's new RTO policy starts Feb. 23".
• EU Council. Directive (EU) 2023/970 of the European Parliament and Council on pay transparency, in force June 6 2023; member-state transposition deadline June 7 2026. Article 5 is the salary-in-job-vacancy clause. EUR-Lex official text.
• Goldman Sachs / JPMorgan five-day-office mandates are referenced via JLL's Q2 2025 report (above), which names them among Fortune 100 firms that moved to five-day mandates in the first quarter of 2025.

US state pay-transparency laws referenced collectively (California SB 1162, New York Pay Transparency Law, Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, Washington SB 5761, Illinois HB 3129) are summarized at the US Department of Labor's Pay Equity resources.