Europe’s biggest tech job is not engineering

Five cities where nobody is mainly hiring engineers§

The phrase "tech jobs" does most of its work as a synonym for engineering. Read the actual listings city by city and that stops being true across much of Europe. In Dublin, Amsterdam and Birmingham, sales is outright the largest category on the page; in Berlin and Manchester it is level with engineering. That is five of the eight cities where we hold enough roles to break down by category.

The exceptions matter as much as the rule. London remains engineering-led, 19 to 10. Paris is led by neither: its largest category today is data and analytics, at 7 roles against 6 in engineering, with sales not reaching the threshold to appear at all. And Madrid is the most engineering-heavy market in the set by a distance.

The same logos, a different job in each city§

The striking part is not that European cities differ. It is that the same employers are behind both patterns. Datadog is among the largest hirers in Amsterdam, Dublin and Madrid simultaneously — a revenue office in two of them and an engineering site in the third. Dublin’s top of the table reads like a roll call of American software: Salesforce 21, Stripe 18, Rippling 18, Notion 14, Datadog 12. Amsterdam’s reads Databricks 19, Flexport 14, Datadog 13.

This is a deliberate corporate shape, not an accident of our sample. Index Ventures, tracking where its portfolio actually lands, counts European headquarters clustered in London, Amsterdam and Dublin, with expansion primarily commercial rather than engineering. Amsterdam offers near-universal English, Schiphol, and the 30% ruling for international hires; Ireland offers the same language advantage and a long-established corporate base. What a company exports to those cities is its ability to sell.

Berlin is the counter-example, and a useful one. Its largest hirer today is Clera, at 40 roles, with Siemens second at 8 — a domestic name well clear of any American one. Berlin is hiring for Berlin.

Where the engineering actually went§

If the revenue organisation went to Dublin and Amsterdam, the engineering volume went south. Madrid shows 39 open engineering roles — more than double London’s 19 — behind Affirm, Datadog and ElevenLabs. It also carries the lowest advertised median in the set, EUR 30,000, against GBP 51,000 in London.

Those two numbers should not be read as the same measurement, and the gap is not a pay comparison — see the note on method below. But the direction is corroborated outside our data: Madrid’s cost of living runs roughly a fifth to a quarter below Dublin and Amsterdam, and Spain’s Beckham Law lets qualifying international hires pay a flat 24% for up to six years. Published Spanish benchmarks put senior engineers between EUR 55,000 and EUR 95,000 — far above the median our own page prints, which tells you something about our median, not about Madrid.

The two cities this story does not describe§

Paris and Lyon sit outside the pattern entirely, and pretending otherwise would be the easy mistake. Paris’s largest hirers today are Thales, Orano and Adecco — defence, nuclear and a staffing agency, each with 3 roles. Lyon’s are Staffmatch, Etiknounou and SNCF Voyageurs, and its listings are dominated by catering and retail shifts.

France’s second city is not a weak tech market in these figures. It is not a tech market in these figures at all — it is a domestic services and staffing market that our aggregate happens to cover. A ranking that placed Lyon low on "European tech hiring" would be measuring the wrong thing and reporting it confidently.

The category that is hardest to see is the one that is growing§

Here is the uncomfortable part. Dublin, the most sales-heavy city in the set, does not disclose enough pay for us to publish a median at all. Neither does Berlin. The two markets where sales leads most clearly are the two we can say the least about.

That is not a coincidence, and the EU pay transparency regime makes it structural. The directive requires reporting on actual variable pay received — not target, not on-target earnings. Commission-heavy sales compensation is precisely the hardest thing to compress into an advertised range, because the range depends on quota, territory and a bonus that has not happened yet. Compensation advisers are already flagging that sales organisations relying on manager discretion and informal exceptions will struggle most with these disclosures.

So the fastest-visible shift in European hiring — toward the commercial side of the software business — is happening in the pay category that transparency rules will illuminate last. Anyone benchmarking European pay from advertised ranges is benchmarking the part of the market that finds disclosure easy.