For a couple of years the word around engineering management was "flattening". Fewer layers, bigger teams per manager, and a lot of managers quietly going back to writing code.
We wanted to know what the job board says now, so we counted.
On October 6, 2026 there were 535 open engineering manager roles across the tech companies we track (titles like "Engineering Manager", "Senior Engineering Manager", "Head of Engineering"), counted as distinct roles, so one role posted in ten cities counts once. That is 4.6% of all open tech roles, at 203 companies.
And the share is going up. Among companies we have tracked since before mid-May, engineering manager titles were 3.8% of the roles opened between early June and early August, and 4.65% of the roles opened since early September. Not a boom. But a clear move in the opposite direction from all that flattening talk.
Who is hiring managers
| Company | EM roles |
|---|---|
| Canonical | 29 |
| Databricks | 23 |
| Stripe | 20 |
| Roblox | 18 |
| Anthropic | 17 |
| GitLab | 13 |
| OpenAI | 12 |
| Adyen | 11 |
| Cloudflare | 11 |
| Grafana Labs | 8 |
| Moniepoint | 8 |
The list is a mix of AI labs, payments companies and infrastructure, most of them companies with a lot of engineering roles open overall.
The titles are mostly plain. "Engineering Manager" on its own is the most common (40 roles), then "Senior Engineering Manager" (10). The rest usually name the area: infrastructure, growth, data platform, core services.
The pay
272 of the 535 publish a yearly US dollar band. The median floor is $215,000 and the median ceiling $280,000.
For a sense of scale, that floor is about $45,000 above the median floor for Python roles on the board ($168,650), and about $35,000 above forward deployed engineers. Management still pays a premium, even in a market that spent two years questioning the layer.
Who gets the job
No surprise here: 452 of the 535 are senior (85%) and 83 are mid-level. There are no junior engineering manager roles, which is a relief for everyone involved.
The stack named most often leans toward infrastructure: AWS (107), Python (98), Kubernetes (96), Go (63), TypeScript (62) and Java (60).
The remote surprise
Managers are more remote-friendly than the average role. 28 engineering manager roles are labelled remote from anywhere, 5.2%, against about 3% for the board as a whole. Another 177 are remote within a country or region, 234 are hybrid, and only 96 (18%) are onsite.
We have not broken that down by company, and Canonical, which tops the table above, posts most of its roles as home based worldwide, so a few employers may be doing a lot of the work here. Still, if you are a manager who wants to stay remote, the odds look better than the average engineer's.
(Treat "remote from anywhere" as a ceiling. We found recently that the label still runs a little generous, which we wrote up in how few remote tech jobs will hire you from anywhere.)
If you are thinking about the move
The jobs exist again, and the share is growing. If you stepped back to an IC role during the flattening, the door has not closed.
Search "engineering manager" and also "head of engineering". At a small company the second title can be the first and only manager role, so it is worth checking both.
Lean on the infrastructure stack. AWS shows up in one in five of these roles, more than any language, with Kubernetes close behind.
Ask how many people you would manage. The titles do not tell you, and flattening did not go away, it just stopped being the headline.
Every role on remoet.dev/jobs carries its seniority, remote policy and stack, and if you star the companies you would manage for, their new roles come to you as they post.
Caveats
We matched manager titles with a pattern, so it also catches a couple of "Solutions Engineering Manager" roles and misses managers with unusual titles. The share trend compares roles opened in two windows at companies we tracked through both, so it says where hiring is moving, not how big the market is. Salaries are only roles that publish a band. And all of it is one day, October 6, 2026.
If you manage engineers and this does not match what you are seeing (especially on team size), tell us in Discord. We would like to know.
