The tech job market is constantly evolving and, every year, the differences between what professionals expect and what companies assume can be tricky.

This year, we partnered with Damia and combined two data sources for the first time: a large-scale survey with tech professionals and real interview data from thousands of real conversations with candidates.

The result is sponsored by INSCALE and is the most comprehensive report of the Portuguese tech market we’ve ever put together.

What are you waiting for to get your copy?

Salaries are stabilising

After years of strong growth, salaries in the tech market have entered a stabilisation phase.

The era of aggressive salary inflation is over, at least for now, driven by more conservative hiring strategies probably related to the current geopolitical uncertainty, and the growing integration of AI into workflows.

We also found that remote-first roles pay 14.3% more than office-first on average and that this difference becomes even wider when we look at company type. On average, product companies pay 24.8% more than consulting, a shift that can impact the way tech professionals think about their next career move.

The tension between what professionals want and what companies are offering has never been sharper. 86% of tech professionals want fully remote with flexible office options while we’re seeing a rise in companies moving in the opposite direction. These policies can be costing companies candidates they can’t afford to lose.

AI is in the workflow but not everyone trusts it completely

74% of tech professionals are already using AI coding tools, some of them daily but adoption and confidence are not the same thing.

60% believe AI will make them more productive, which can sound optimistic until you read the rest: 32% are still unsure where AI is heading. That’s nearly one in three developers who are using the tools while remaining genuinely uncertain about what comes next.

The picture in recruitment is even more nuanced. 47% of professionals believe AI should be used in hiring but only with human oversight. Only 3% of the respondents are comfortable with an 100% AI-driven recruitment which means the industry is open to AI assistance, but not ready to hand over the wheel.

AI is becoming a part of how tech teams operate, but the professionals using it are doing so with eyes open. They’re adapting but not blindly and not without reservations.

The international market is still attracting Portuguese talent

Foreign employer hiring is being led by the UK at 25% and the USA at 17% with the main driver seeming to be access to high-income markets that pay in currencies and at salary levels the local market can’t match yet.

Remote work is a big part of what makes this possible. Not all tech professionals working for foreign companies relocate, many continue to live in Portugal while working for employers abroad, which means the appeal of international roles isn’t necessarily tied to a change of lifestyle or location, it can just be a question of numbers or even remote options.

The juniors are getting harder to find

One of the most talked-about dynamics in tech hiring gets confirmed in our report: only 12% of the tech workforce has less than 3 years of experience. The junior layer of the market is thin and getting thinner which can represent a serious problem in a nearby future.

When the junior pipeline is narrow, teams that rely on growing talent internally find themselves with fewer people to develop and the knowledge transfer that typically happens between generations of developers (the informal mentoring, the code review culture, the gradual accumulation of institutional knowledge) starts to falter.

The irony is that this is happening at exactly the moment when AI tools are boosting what a junior can produce. We can have more output and fewer juniors but we need to make sure we are building the foundations for the next generation of senior talent. And right now, those foundations are narrower than they should be.

The roles the market is hiring

On the technical side, a few clear patterns emerge from real interview data:

Backend: Java, C, and Python hold the top three spots. Cloud experience, particularly AWS, is increasingly expected as a standard requirement. Golang, Ruby, and Scala lead on compensation.

Frontend: React remains dominant, but Angular made a significant jump, reflecting a year where enterprise hiring took precedence over startups. Next.js and TypeScript command above-average salaries.

Fullstack: Java and JavaScript dominate. Python-based profiles are rising, reflecting the broader shift toward data and AI integration.

DevOps and SRE: Terraform and infrastructure-as-code are now standard. Scripting alone is no longer enough and DevOps professionals are expected to program.

AI/ML: TensorFlow and PyTorch dominate. The highest-value profiles combine machine learning with data engineering end-to-end. Computer vision leads on compensation, followed by LLM and NLP.

What to do with this information

Data is only useful if it changes something.

We hope these insights can already help you when making decisions such as what skills to keep investing in, what compensation packages to go for and so on.

The important thing is to know your market rate before your next conversation.

Read the full Tech Talent Trends 2026 report for free.