What 1,360 Software Engineer Job Postings Actually Ask For

We pulled every open posting from 72 companies' public Greenhouse job boards, kept the 1,360 whose title contains “software engineer,” and counted how many of them mention each of 45 technical terms at least once.

The number beside each term is the share of postings that mention it — not how often it appears. A posting that says “Python” nine times counts once, the same as one that says it in passing.

The top four are not technologies. Scalability, distributed systems, mentoring and system design each appear in more postings than any single programming language. A resume built entirely from a tools list is missing the vocabulary that most postings lead with.

No language is close to universal. Python tops the list at 44.8%, meaning more than half of these postings never name it. Writing a resume to match “the” software engineering stack is writing to a stack that does not exist.

Mentoring appears in 47.4% of postings — more than Kubernetes, React or TypeScript. It is one of the most commonly asked-for and least commonly written-about things on this list.

Source. The Greenhouse job board API, which companies expose so their listings can be embedded on their own sites. No scraping and no private data. Any figure here can be re-derived from that endpoint; the collector and analyzer are in the repository.

Selection. Postings were matched on the title alone, requiring the phrase “software engineer.” Titles like “Senior Software Engineer, Payments” are in; “Engineering Manager” is out.

Deduplication. The same role posted to five offices returns five near-identical records. Postings were deduped on company, normalized title and content length, which removed 69 of an initial 1,233.

Counting. Document frequency — the share of postings mentioning a term at least once. Ambiguous English words are matched case-sensitively with exclusions, because a bare match on “Go” also catches “go to market” and overstates it by about two points. The same applies to React, Spark, Swift and Rust.

Limits worth stating. These are 72 mostly US technology companies hiring through one ATS vendor. They are not a random sample of all software engineering jobs, and the mix skews toward well-funded product companies. Terms absent from our 45-term list are not counted, so absence here is not evidence of absence in the market.