SE Job Ad Index, first snapshot
What SE job ads mention: November 2026
On 3 November 2026, 250 selected B2B software companies had 1,502 open SE-type postings on their public job boards. Nearly half mention at least one of the AI-related terms we searched for; one in twenty mentions a term in the MEDDIC family.
45% of SE-type postings mention at least one searched AI-related term
677 of 1,502 postings match a search for terms including generative AI, LLMs, AI agents, agentic, prompting or prompts.
- Selected companies
- 250
- All open postings
- 20,665
- SE-type postings
- 1,502
- Companies with SE-type postings
- 163
SE-type includes sales engineer, solutions engineer or consultant, presales, value engineer or advisor, forward deployed engineer, and solutions architect when the ad matches sales-context terms.
What the ads mention
Terms in 1,502 SE-type job ads
The last column averages each company's own share, so one large employer does not set the figure.
| In the ad | Postings (share) | Per company |
|---|---|---|
| Demo | 882 (58.7%) | 63.7% |
| Generative AI, LLMs, AI agents, agentic, prompting or prompts | 677 (45.1%) | 48.8% |
| Discovery | 658 (43.8%) | 48.0% |
| Python | 650 (43.3%) | 33.3% |
| Proof of concept or proof of value | 602 (40.1%) | 44.8% |
| AWS, Azure or Google Cloud | 562 (37.4%) | 27.3% |
| SQL | 346 (23.0%) | 15.1% |
| Value selling, business case or ROI | 324 (21.6%) | 18.1% |
| JavaScript, TypeScript or Node.js | 297 (19.8%) | 21.9% |
| MEDDIC, MEDDICC or MEDDPICC | 76 (5.1%) | 5.1% |
| Command of the Message, Challenger, SPIN and similar | 74 (4.9%) | 4.0% |
21 of 163 companies have an SE-type posting with a MEDDIC-family term. MongoDB and Chainguard account for 43 of the 76 postings.
209 forward deployed engineer ads, most mentioning Python
162 of the 209 mention Python, against 50 of 237 sales engineer ads and 16 of 157 solutions consultant ads. None of the 209 matches the MEDDIC-family search, and 14 mention a proof of concept or proof of value, against 136 of 237 sales engineer ads.
Posted pay
Pay data was found in about half the postings
Pay data was extracted from 722 of 1,502 postings; 614 have a range classified as annual USD.
$180,000 to $247,500 median lower and upper bounds of the 614 annual USD ranges, with a median midpoint of $213,750.
137 of 614 ranges were classified as OTE, 147 as base and the other 330 were unclassified.
| Title family | USD ranges | Median midpoint |
|---|---|---|
| Forward deployed engineer | 113 | $216,104 |
| Solutions architect (sales work) | 161 | $213,750 |
| Solutions engineer | 124 | $213,500 |
| Value engineer or consultant | 22 | $200,000 |
| Sales engineer | 111 | $192,500 |
| Presales | 33 | $176,750 |
| Solutions consultant | 50 | $153,125 |
The table compares posted ranges, not what people earn.
Method and limits
250 public job boards, read once on 3 November 2026
The sample is a fixed list of 250 B2B software companies whose job boards run on Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, each read once through its public API. A posting counts when its title matches a fixed pattern for SE work; technical account manager counts only with presales in the title.
Each tag is a case-insensitive text match on the title and description. A match does not show whether the term is required, preferred or boilerplate: an AI company may mention AI agents because it sells them, and discovery can mean data discovery.
This is a sample of companies, not the SE job market. Companies on Workday, iCIMS or their own careers site are missing, and the list leans toward US software, data and AI companies. Databricks alone has 270 of the 1,502 ads, hence the per company column. A role posted in several cities counts once per posting (1,141 distinct company and title pairs). Titles such as customer engineer, field engineer and sales consultant are missed. Pay comes from a structured field or else the first matching text range. Interval, currency and OTE or base are partly inferred, so some ranges can be misclassified.
One snapshot shows no trend. The CSV lists each ad's company, title, location, tags, posted pay and link; no ad text is republished.
Download the postings and tags (CSV)
The data is available under CC BY 4.0 at github.com/jacobtop-tcg/se-job-ad-index.