We all know developers are in high demand. According to Eurostat, every 3rd company in the EU is looking for a programmer and over 50% of those companies report difficulties in recruiting these professionals. In Germany alone, more than 124,000 jobs cannot currently be filled. 

So is there a shortage of developers? Well, a job seeker might have a different perspective. One study analysed the number of applications for the average graduate job. The results came back and it was about 39 candidate applications per position. 

Is there a developer shortage in Europe?

I did a little test on LinkedIn to see if I could get similar numbers for developer roles. I picked a city (Berlin) and filtered by job title. LinkedIn will show you how many applications a job posting has received. So I looked at the numbers of the top 20. I would say, close to 50% of roles had received over 100+ applications. After a month, even the lower end would be receiving around 50 applicants. That’s just one platform. A recruiter is going to post on their website and three to four other developer job platforms, plus they’ll do their cold outreach.  

All things considered, it doesn’t sound like a shortage of applicants to me. I know this is all speculative and there are a bunch of factors to consider when hiring but my example hints at a larger point, which is; there’s not a shortage of developers, there’s a shortage of skilled developers. That’s important. Companies are desperately looking for developers who can jump into a codebase and don’t require any hand-holding. That’s much harder to find. 

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Most in-demand developer jobs

Where am I going with this? Well, I want to help you find a job of course! What this data tells us, is that if you’re a skilled developer (with a couple of years under your belt) you’re in hot demand. That puts you in a very nice position. Companies are waiting months and months to fill these positions.

In this article, I’ll go through some of the top developer positions companies are trying to fill. If you’re a senior developer, know that Europe wants you! And if you’re a junior developer, get proficient in one of these roles so that you can get to Europe… or America, or wherever! 

Note: this list is not in any particular order since it’s hard to quantify.

1. Full-Stack developer

Salary range: €57,000 – €72,000 (GER)

So we’ll start this list with your typical, most common web developers: fullstack, frontend, and backend. Over half of the job posts in the last month fall into one of these roles. In my experiment, there were over 700+ job ads for Fullstack engineers (or full stack developers) in Berlin. 

A skilled fullstack developer is going to be proficient in frontend technologies and backend ones, so it makes sense why they’d be super popular. Instead of getting a frontend developer and a backend developer, just find a fullstack one! That’s half the overhead. I’d imagine this would be very appealing to your SMEs.  

2. Front-end developer

Salary range: €50,000 – €69,000 (GER)
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I like to think that when U.S. News ranks the job of Software Developer as the best job in America, they are talking about frontend developers. I say that because I’m biased and love how code translates into visual designs. I mean check out some of these developer portfolios, they are stunning. 

Okay so you’re a JavaScript guy, using React, what are your options? A lot. A frontend search will render over 300 jobs while React will render you over 400 job opportunities. Yep, LinkedIn job search is not perfect. Frontend is obviously a great place to get experience before you specialise or expand into a fullstack role — that’s where the real money is made!

3. Back-end developer

Salary range: €54,000 – €75,000 (GER)
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‍Backend developers are wildly in demand. Backend jobs are a bit more complicated than frontend jobs and more sort after. When I searched LinkedIn, there were over 700 job opportunities (compared to 300 with frontend) — so it’s comparable with fullstack roles. Java, PHP, Ruby, and Node.js are going to be the most desired skills for this role so if you’re proficient in any of them you’re going to have a bunch of options in Europe. 

Totally anecdotal but it appears to me that backend and fullstack roles have few applicants than frontend or web developer roles. That’s generally the case the more specialised the role gets (there will be less competition). So the good news is if you do have these skills, 20-30 candidates compared with 100+ — that’s a lot less competitive. 

4. DevOps engineer

Salary range: €56,000 – €77,000 (GER)

I’m not going to assume that you know what a DevOps engineer is, so let me give a quick overview. DevOps engineers are responsible for the deployment and management of software applications. They work closely with developers, testers, and other stakeholders to ensure that software is delivered quickly, reliably, and securely. 

The Glassdoor salary range for this job, I think, skews on the low side. DevOps engineer work to a larger scope than other web developers. The decisions they make can seriously cost companies money. I mean just look at the career roadmap for a role like this. From my LinkedIn search, there were over 400 job opportunities, with an average of around 20 applicants. 

5. Cloud Engineer

Salary range: €60,000 – €83,000 (GER)

How’s it looking for cloud engineers in Europe? Pretty good actually. Also, cloud engineering is a subset of DevOps, so really you can combine what I said about DevOps with what I say about this. AWS and Azure developers are by far the most popular, as you probably guessed. If you are proficient in either of these (or both) you’ll there have been over 500 job opportunities in Berlin just this month. 

Cloud engineering is a pathway to take if you're coming from the backend side of things. It probably makes more sense to end up in a cloud role than if you started as a frontend developer. Again, the roadmap is probably going to be much like the DevOps roadmap. If you are this far down the road you’re going to be a strong candidate for a bunch of companies. 

6. Mobile developer

Salary range: €54,000 – €94,000 (GER)

Mobile developers aren’t going out of fashion anytime soon. From what I’ve read everything is on the up and up. Salary is increasing year on year, same with job opportunities and job growth. So if you are a mobile app developer you’re in a very secure position. 

So taking things back to LinkedIn, there were over 400 mobile developer jobs in the last month, 500 application developer roles, 400 android, and 300 IOS. That’s a lot of jobs on the market. Kotlin, React Native and Swift seemed to be what companies wanted in terms of technical skills in this space. 

7. Machine learning

Salary range: €62,000 – €82,000 (GER)

A Machine Learning Engineer is a software engineer who specialises in developing and deploying machine learning models. Their responsibilities include collecting and preprocessing data, designing and developing machine learning models, training and testing models, deploying models, monitoring, and maintaining, and collaborating with cross-functional teams. 

Machine learning is where data mixes with software engineering. Arguably, data always mixes with software development, but in this case, you really got to know it — including the data languages like SQL and MongoDB plus container technologies like Kubernetes and Docker. Here’s the roadmap. There were over 700 jobs posted in the last month. A lot of these were from your big well-known unicorn-status companies. It’s the bigger enterprise companies that want ML developers — you’re probably not going to find many opportunities with SMEs. 

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More developer jobs

We could go through all of the top developer jobs from one to one hundred but in all honestly, I don’t really have that kind of time. The whole field of software development is growing, yes some roles are in much higher demand than others but if you’re a skilled developer in a certain tech stack, you’re going to have job options. Maybe you have to learn a new framework but you’d be surprised at how flexible some of these companies can be. 

I know a lot of this article was based on anecdotal evidence, but I think it still paints an honest picture of the job opportunities out there. If you are in one of these seven roles I mentioned, the future is bright, keep learning, keep grinding and companies in Europe will be making offers left right, and center. Maybe you’re searching for a job now. Great – Sign up on our job platform to see what opportunities await!