Unfortunately, the Tech Hiring Activity Index for June doesn’t bring any particularly good news.

However, there is a compelling trend: just two months ago, roughly three times as many US tech companies were hiring for classic manual QA as for dedicated AI testing roles. That gap has now narrowed to two to one.
But don’t let the growth rates fool you. While dedicated AI roles – those where AI is the deliverable, whether that means building, testing, and evaluating models or developing applications on top of ready-made ones, rather than merely using AI tools to support other work – are emerging, they are doing so from a very low baseline and still represent a tiny fraction of the overall tech job market.

Daily, the AI agents of Mentorpiece Vacy scan thousands of sources directly — company websites, applicant tracking systems, and job boards — for tech job openings. They filter out the noise, determine the true “freshness” of each posting, identify its exact tech role, and weed out fraudulent listings.
Millions of accumulated records on hiring start and end dates for every tech role across thousands of tech companies enable the automatic calculation of the ⚡️Mentorpiece Vacy Index. This is a monthly Tech Hiring Activity Index that provides an unvarnished analytical view of the tech industry’s health and the rise or fall in demand for specific tech roles.

The job market for manual testers continues to deteriorate, extending a multi-month downturn.

Hiring for automation engineers and senior QA specialists has remained flat in recent months, leaving the market in a “wait-and-see” phase.

This segment (comprising roles like ML Evaluation and AI QA) is showing relative growth, narrowing its gap with manual QA. However, it is still in its infancy, and in absolute numbers, these listings remain exceptionally scarce.

The most talked-about corner of this space is pure-play AI application development — yet, while its upward trajectory is worth watching closely, it still constitutes a minuscule, single-digit percentage of overall tech hiring.

More details

• A preview of job openings added daily by AI agents to the database used to calculate the index is available on Telegram: Manual QA, Automation/Senior QA, and AI QA/ML Evaluation.

What does the future hold for tech hiring?

The next ⚡️Mentorpiece Vacy Index report will be released next month:
• In the Orange QA Journal
• On social media platforms (including Telegram)

Mentorpiece Vacy Index June 2026: Classic Tech Role Hiring Drops, While Dedicated AI Remains Niche