States that host cloud infrastructure also create jobs to build, secure, and maintain these systems.
A new study of 850,000 tech job postings by Oxylabs Research has revealed employers in 36 states seek candidates with cloud skills.
The Oxylabs team reports that professionals with expertise in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and data engineering are in particularly high demand due to the specialized nature of these roles.
Among employers across 36 states, California leads in technology hiring, representing 13% of the 850,000 tech job postings analyzed by Oxylabs between January 2025 and March 2026.
Texas follows with 8%, New York with 5%, and Virginia with 4%.
All other states accounted for 3% or less of postings referencing at least one technology tool.
The report notes that organizations are focused on building and maintaining cloud environments, resulting in software engineering roles comprising 38% of job listings.
Data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning positions account for 14%, while technology and engineering management, DevOps, and cloud and site reliability roles constitute 12%.
Data analysis and business intelligence roles represent 11%.
The Oxylabs team observes that skills related to managing large datasets are increasingly prioritized.
Data storage and cloud platforms are most frequently mentioned, with business intelligence and analytics tools ranking closely behind.
The technology, data, and telecommunications sector is the primary driver of tech employment in the United States, accounting for 45% of the analyzed job postings, significantly outpacing other sectors.
Professional, legal, and business services follow at 17%, with manufacturing, industrial, and defense, as well as finance, insurance, and real estate, each at 8%.
Healthcare, pharmaceutical, and wellness roles account for 3%, while education, government, and nonprofit, logistics, travel, and construction, consumer, retail, and agriculture, energy, utilities, and environment, and media, entertainment, and arts each represent 2% or less.
Most technology hiring is concentrated in a limited number of functional areas, including software engineering, backend and full-stack development, data engineering and architecture, data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning, business intelligence, DevOps and site reliability engineering, cybersecurity, and technology management.
AWS is identified as the most in-demand technology tool.
The Oxylabs Research report, based on 850,000 job postings from January 2025 to March 2026, identifies employer preferences during a period of simultaneous downsizing and hiring.
While automation is cited as a reason for layoffs through 2025 and 2026, the report finds that technology job postings have reached a three-year high, constituting 39% of all listings in the Oxylabs dataset, which is more than 3.7 times the activity of the previous year.
AWS is identified as the most in-demand technology tool, appearing the most in analyzed listings.
Nearly 42% of postings require proficiency in at least one of the three major cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, with AWS and Azure most frequently co-mentioned.
For data entry and support roles, Excel is referenced in 46% of listings during the first quarter of 2026.
The ten most frequently mentioned technology tools in U.S. job postings are:
- Amazon Web Services (30%)
- Microsoft Azure (24%)
- Git (21%)
- Excel (15%)
- Google Cloud Platform (14%)
- Docker (13%)
- Power BI (9%)
- Terraform (8%)
- Tableau (7.5%)
The report concludes that cloud infrastructure is foundational to the modern enterprise technology stack, and cloud proficiency is essential for those pursuing technology careers or seeking greater job stability.
In data warehousing, Snowflake is mentioned in approximately 6% of postings, surpassing BigQuery at 2%.
Employers are seeking professionals capable of managing and scaling containers in production environments, with Kubernetes (14%) slightly ahead of Docker (13%).
In business intelligence, Power BI is referenced 1.2 times more than Tableau, and in the spreadsheet category, Excel is mentioned 38 times more often than Google Sheets.
The study finds that data storage and infrastructure tools, primarily cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, account for 47% of all tool mentions in technology job postings.
DevOps and developer experience tools, led by Git and including Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform, represent 30%.
Business intelligence and analytics tools, such as Power BI, Tableau, and Looker, account for 18%. Data ingestion and transformation tools, including dbt, Fivetran, Kafka, and Airbyte, comprise 4%, while orchestration and observability tools like Airflow represent 1%.