Forward Deployed Engineering went from our Emerging Jobs watchlist to the #2 hottest job, behind only AI Engineering. Companies have moved from building AI to deploying it, and they need engineers embedded with customers to make it work.

HR Generalist, Marketing Generalist, Strategic Business Operations, and Chief of Staff all landed on the cold list. Meanwhile, narrower roles like Internal Audit, Marketing Analytics, and Treasurer heated up.

The compliance theme carried into this quarter, but its center moved. Security roles cooled, while Internal Audit, Treasurer, and Business Process heated up alongside Data Governance. Companies are hiring for oversight and control of their data, money, and processes.

Drawn from Pave's real-time dataset of 2M+ employees across 9,000+ companies, skewed toward technology companies.

The Hot Jobs Score measures which roles are gaining or losing momentum across the workforce - ranked from −100 (cooling fast) to +100 (heating fast).

The score combines two signals:
- Hiring Momentum (65%): how a role's share of new hires is trending over time
- Workforce Prevalence (35%): how a role's share of total headcount is trending over time

Both signals are measured as a growth rate relative to baseline, so a small-but-fast-growing role is compared fairly against a large established one. Each is converted to a percentile rank across all eligible job families, then combined into the final score.

Alongside the score, we surface a supporting compensation signal, the new-hire to employee pay ratio, which compares recent-hire median base pay to the broader population. A ratio above 1 indicates employers are paying a premium to attract new talent into that role, a sign of real market competition.

Scores cover tech job families, exclude executive levels, and require a minimum number of employees and companies per job family to ensure statistical reliability. The company panel is held constant across time so trends reflect role composition, not reporting changes.