What Software Engineer job postings ask for
Python appears in 40% of Software Engineer job postings, followed by Java (32%) and Go (29%) — counted across 1,617 live postings from company career sites.
Every term below was counted in real postings published by employers. We tally what each posting names at least once, so one keyword-stuffed listing can’t inflate a number.
Counted across 1,617 Software Engineer postings gathered from company career sites and seen in the last 90 days. Percentages are the share of those postings naming each term. Last verified against live postings on ; re-checked every six hours.
Skills and tools, most-asked first
- Python40% · 647 of 1,617
- Java32% · 517 of 1,617
- Go29% · 469 of 1,617
- TypeScript23% · 372 of 1,617
- Kubernetes21% · 340 of 1,617
- C++18% · 291 of 1,617
- React17% · 275 of 1,617
- JavaScript16% · 259 of 1,617
- AWS14% · 226 of 1,617
- SQL13% · 210 of 1,617
- AI12% · 194 of 1,617
- Rust11% · 178 of 1,617
- Distributed systems11% · 178 of 1,617
- Scala9% · 146 of 1,617
- Ruby8% · 129 of 1,617
- GraphQL8% · 129 of 1,617
- CI/CD8% · 129 of 1,617
- Docker8% · 129 of 1,617
- PostgreSQL7% · 113 of 1,617
- GCP7% · 113 of 1,617
- Kafka7% · 113 of 1,617
- Azure6% · 97 of 1,617
- Terraform6% · 97 of 1,617
- Kotlin6% · 97 of 1,617
- Spark5% · 81 of 1,617
Questions about this data
What skills do most Software Engineer job postings ask for?
Across 1,617 Software Engineer postings from the last 90 days, the most frequently named are Python (40%), Java (32%), Go (29%). Each percentage is the share of those postings naming the term at least once.
How common is SQL in Software Engineer postings?
SQL appears in 13% of the 1,617 Software Engineer postings counted — roughly 210 of them. That places it mid-pack rather than near-universal, which is worth knowing before you rewrite a résumé around it.
Where does this Software Engineer data come from?
Public job postings published by employers on their own career sites, collected through the official Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby job-board APIs. It is a count of 1,617 real postings seen in the last 90 days — not a survey, an estimate, or a model's guess.
Should I add these skills to my résumé?
Only the ones you genuinely have. Frequency tells you which terms to surface and phrase in the employer's own words if they are already true of you. Adding a skill you can't defend is the fastest way to fail an interview, so FreshStartr reports gaps rather than writing them in.
Other roles we track
- Sales
- Solutions Architect
- Operations
- Customer Success
- Product Manager
- Finance
- Machine Learning Engineer
- Marketing
Which of these does your résumé actually evidence?
Paste a Software Engineer posting and you get a line-by-line match report: what you already prove, and what you don’t. Gaps are reported, never written in for you.
Check my résumé