I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

I’ve been less active on Twitter and Linkedin than usual. I wrote about that on this newsletter, and I’ve received lots of messages from you all. Thanks for that!

The reason for my absence is because I’ve had a big inflow of clients in recent months for my Fractional CTO services, and I’ve been informally sharing some of these paid work opportunities with folks in my network. Both Fractional CTOs, and also Senior Engineers.

It has been working quite well, clients are happy, these fellow CTOs and Engineers are happy, and the whole thing seems to be working. So it’s time for me to take the next step.

• Announcing CTOteam.ai

The Fractional CTO market is growing and this AI wave is accelerating this growth. I’ll write a longer newsletter about it, but the TLDR is:

• AI tools lower the barriers to build a startup MVP.

• There’s huge FOMO to use AI in every possible use case.

• So, the amount of startups that have market traction, but whose product has terrible code, security gaps, performance issues, and no team to maintain it will grow at an unprecedented pace.

I feel like those dev shop horror stories that have pushed Founders to hire Fractional CTOs over the years were just a taster. The AI-no-code and “vibe coded” MVPs will be an even bigger driver of demand, I think.

So here’s my thinking. My network and my content can bring a significant number of Startup Founders who want to hire me as their Fractional CTO. However, as an individual, I don’t scale anywhere near the market demand for my services. I can take 2–3 clients at a time, and I’m happy with that. Everything else, I’ll need to delegate.

And turns out, many of you reading this right now have messaged me saying that you have the opposite challenge. You have the right experience and the bandwidth to take new clients, however you can’t find them. I’ll try to connect the dots.

For now, just fill in the form at ctoteam.ai/talent. I’ll be in touch.

In fact, I reckon that the simple matchmaking process between clients and CTOs/Engineers who want to take them can soon become an intense operational nightmare. That’s the very reason why I’ve been procrastinating on this project for over a year.

And to address that, I decided that I shouldn’t launch CTOteam alone. I’ve invited my good friend and former co-Founder Gui Lopes to help me. Gui is a seasoned startup COO with solid startup growth trajectories and a big exit under his belt. He’s been working as a Fractional COO recently, and after a couple chats it became obvious that we’d launch this together.

I think this will be great, and I look forward to continue bringing great people to work with me, and fulfil this vision of working on a fractional capacity, remotely from anywhere in the world, and helping startups succeed along the way. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover

I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I wrote about the growth of the Product Engineer role, and how Software Engineers can reap the opportunities that come with this market trend.

Today I’ll tell you about my Fractional CTO career, and the ups and downs that come with it. As I wrote many times, a freelance career is a fine balance between two extremes:

• Anxiety from having no clients.

• Burn out from having too many clients.

It’s a famine or feast type of career. Gotta adapt to the bumpy nature of income.

I’m now lucky enough to have “too many” clients. And since I haven’t yet learned to say “No”, I’m finding creative ways to take more clients without burning out. More on that in a second.

The very reason why I have a tough time declining paying clients is because I still vividly remember all the times when I had no clients at all. Or when I had one client but was too afraid to lose it. Anxiety is real, and in retrospect the most memorable times of my Fractional CTO career have been these lows where I struggled to make ends meet. It was famine back then and it sucked big time.

Now it’s a different time. It’s absolute feast, I’m having new clients left and right. It’s like all the efforts I seeded over the years with my network and my online content have suddenly reached harvest season at the same time.

You might have noticed that I haven’t posted much content on X and Linkedin recently. It’s a bug, not a feature. I’m swamped and simply have no bandwidth for social media right now, I’ll resume content creation ASAP, which is something I enjoy doing.

I’m incredibly lucky to have a significant number of clients finding me and wanting to hire me, but I don’t have the bandwidth to work as a Fractional CTO for all of them. However I try really hard to do it, since each new client is an opportunity to learn about a new industry, new client segments, new technologies, etc etc. Make no mistake, I work for profit of course, but there’s a lot more incentive to take a client, beyond the money.

Most of these clients come to me through my content or warm intros from network, they want to work with me, so I’m building a network of fellow CTOs, Software Engineers, and QAs. This way I can take more clients opportunities and delegate parts of the work to people in my network who are kick starting their own Fractional career.

I started trying this approach last year, and with the growing demand I’m getting these days I’m definitely enjoying to share the work and the income with fellow remote workers who can extend my own capabilities.

Bringing people to work with me on client opportunities has allowed me to reap the growing opportunity of building fixed scope projects for startups, which I wasn’t taking solo for lack of bandwidth. I’m fully accountable for the hiring, so I mostly hire remote anywhere. And I’m quite transparent with the budget splits and client dynamics, I don’t want to run an agency with lots of people on the payroll, but I do want to share opportunities that I’d otherwise decline for lack of bandwidth.

So, now when I receive a new client request my decision tree is:

1 If I have enough bandwidth, then I take the client on a normal Fractional CTO engagement.

2 If I lack the bandwidth but I like the client, then I assemble a small team to service the client.

3 If I lack the bandwidth and can’t (or don’t want to) service the client at all, then I refer the client to someone else in my network with a warm intro.

So, if you’re interested in joining this adhoc network of Fractional CTOs and Software Engineers, or if you’d like me to refer clients to you. Simply reply to this newsletter with your CV/Linkedin and some context. I’m traveling over the extended weekend, but I’ll reply to everyone next week.

I’m feeling very fortunate at the moment, and I’m keen to continue sharing my luck with fellow remote workers who can help me help more startups succeed.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover

I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I wrote my playbook to find and land jobs at remote startups, after having worked as a Remote CTO myself for 10 years, and having hired over 1000 remote workers, I’ve learned a few things.

In fact, if you want to dive deeper into other materials I’ve produced with my knowledge to help job seekers:

• Remote Jobs Braintrust — My private community, with recorded sessions to help remote workers, both by me and by community members who landed remote jobs. It became my go-to place to post new opportunities at my teams and beyond.

• Jobs Copilot AI — I built these AI agents that scrape 400k career pages, find new jobs for you and apply on your behalf. This is for remote and non-remote jobs. Give it a try.

Today I’m telling you about the growth of the Product Engineer profile, as I wrote in my predictions for 2025. As Gergely Orosz called out, job descriptions in tech startups are converging into two main categories:

• Product Engineers

• AI Engineers

I’d even say more. This is happening, even for roles whose job title isn’t exactly “Product Engineer” and “AI Engineer”. It’s more and more of a standard expectation of any Software Engineer to have a “product sense”.

So, you may ask:

• “What’s a product sense?”

In my view, myself and other CTOs, Founders, etc are looking for Software Engineers who:

• Can push working code to a repo and enable some product feature (this used to be almost 100% of the JD)

• Can understand the product, the use case, and key industry nuances (this used to be more of a Product Manager’s territory)

• Can contribute with scope, architecture, process ideas (a merge of both previous bullets, it used to be a Tech Manager/Lead doing only this)

It’s definitely an increasing requirement in tech. In some cases companies actually call this a Product Engineer and include all these expectations in the JD (like Stacks, which Gergely pointed out). Other times companies keep more tech-focused JDs with more common titles, but they end up hiring a product engineer type profile, because even when they don’t plan for that they receive such a big number of applications that they can afford to select a candidate who ticks all those boxes.

As Software Engineers, we really have only 2 options:

• Keep focusing only on writing code and compete against AI tools (uphill battle since that’s what these tools are best at).

• Expand our focus towards product, process, etc and adopt a Product Engineer positioning in the market, there will be plenty of opportunity.

The main factor that lead to this expectation change about the Software Engineer role was the growth of AI tools, and how they are making software engineers more efficient. This means a Software Engineer can complete a given work item in a fraction of the time.

So, what to do with the remaining time? If a Software Engineer completes a week’s work in a day, what to do with the rest of the days?

There two things happening:

• Teams are getting smaller and Software Engineers are being given bigger scopes of work. Bigger means in many cases towards scope definition, architecture, etc (the “product sense”).

• Many companies are hiring Software Engineers on a Fractional basis, instead of full timers. These are essentially Product Engineers, using AI tools like Cursor, and who have relevant industry/product knowledge.

As such, I think we’ll see huge growth of this Remote Fractional Product Engineer type of career. I’ve been hiring this profile a lot myself (even since before I saw these terms coined together), and I can tell very strong teams can be built this way.

In case you’re looking for a remote role right now, these are the open roles in my teams, all fully remote:

Opportunities to work with me

• React Native + React Engineer — To build both hybrid mobile apps and web interfaces. Fractional for now, with longer term possibility to go full time.

• Backend Engineer (Python + AWS) — To build the whole backend of the app from scratch. Fractional for now, with longer term possibility to go full time.

• AI Engineer — Mostly Python, with experience building AI agents and genAI-enabled features. I have more than one such opportunity, both fractional and project based (at least for now).

• Fintech “AI Architect” — I’m working with a bank to automate their processes with AI agents. I need an AI Engineer type profile but with Fintech experience and some experience in more “traditional” non-startup contexts. Fractional.

If you’re interested in any of these roles, simply drop me your CV/linkedin and a quick intro paragraph, as a reply to this newsletter email (or a DM on X/Linkedin).

These are just a few remote opportunities, there’s thousands more out there in remote startups. Only this week I saw 160k+ new jobs being ingested at Jobs Copilot, at least 55k of those are remote jobs.

This is how the JobsCopilot works:

1/ Your auto-application profile

Once you switch to the Premium plan, you’ll be prompted to fill in a profile section with your replies to common demographic questions found in job application forms:

2/ Your auto-apply flow

Besides that initial setup, you’ll now find this new button in the jobs card. Just click the “Auto Apply” button on the jobs that are relevant to you, and that will trigger the auto-apply backend flow (no application is sent before your final revision):

3/ Application form is fetched and pre-filled for you

All jobs you’ve ticked “Auto Apply” are moved to the “Jobs to Apply” tab. And for each of them our backend pulls the application form, and our AI generates replies to each of the form questions based on the job description and your profile. Within a couple minutes you can find the pre-filled job application form in each job card:

4/ One-click confirmation

For now, I’m requiring you to review and click this submit button for every job, as I want you to feel in control of your applications, and I want to capture feedback on quality of this flow. I might make it more automated upon some configs in the future.

Once you submit a job for Auto Apply, the copilot will submit your application in the following minutes/hours (depending on work load). You’ll get these messages on your email on a frequent basis, like I’m receiving on a daily basis:

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover

I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I answered the question “Will AI tools replace Software Developers?”. It’s a heated up discussion right now, I felt the need to share my optimism amidst all the doom and gloom I’m reading every day.

Today I’m telling you about the massive shift I’m seeing in Startup team compositions. Most Startups I speak with have:

• Non-technical Founders

• A small tech team of contractors in LCOL countries

• Everyone working remote

Of course this creates a big gap in tech leadership, and that’s why these startups hire me (or many others) as a Fractional CTO. It’s the perfect trade off to bring an experienced CTO at the cost of an inexperienced full timer. Fractional CTOs are a natural backstop for costly mistakes in hiring, product development, vendor selection, investor due diligence, etc.

However, the opportunities are beyond the fCTO role. Who are those contractors? I can tell you, because I’m many times the one who hires them:

• Senior Engineers who love to code and to be individual contributors

• Used to working part time or fixed scope engagements

• Happy to charge higher rates than they would on a full time job in their country

Not everyone loves the non-determinism, I understand that. But many people do love the flexibility that comes with a Fractional career (myself included!).

In many cases, these fractional roles end up evolving into exciting full time opportunities, in cases where the startup grows and needs a fully committed team.

So, the question is: How can you find those high paying remote jobs, either Fractional or full time?

Most times these roles aren’t published on job boards, and I’m a good example of that. Every week I publish the open roles in my teams in this newsletter before I publish them elsewhere. In fact, that was the main reason why I build the JobsCopilot.

If you want a role in a startup, you need to understand a few basic things:

1/ Startups are small

Most startups don’t yet have an HR team or person, it’s probably the Founder who’s in charge of the interview process still. Don’t simply apply to the open position on their website. Go around, connect with the Founder on Linkedin and message them. They are very busy, but if you’re the solution for the gap in their team you’ve likely skipped a line of hundreds of applicants.

2/ Founders are outspoken

Many times Founders and CTOs will simply write a post on Linkedin or X when they are hiring. If you follow companies you’re interested in, or relevant people in a certain space, you might spot these opportunities before most people see them, and apply early and directly to the founder or CTO.

3/ Startup’s processes are ad hoc

If you went to an interview and didn’t hear anything back from them, follow up with your interviewer. Very often other priorities come up and they are just procrastinating on the recruiting process. Again, by showing up you’ll likely standout, in case your profile is considered relevant for the role.

4/ Startups have their very own culture

You need to be a bit a jack of all trades, rather than a specialist in one thing. You also need to be curious about new technologies and vendors in the company’s industry. And above all, you need to have a very high level of ownership and accountability. Bring all this to the interview, with concrete examples from your past jobs, and you’ll be a step closer to the offer.

In case you’re looking for a remote role right now, these are the open roles in my teams:

Opportunities to work with me

• React Native Engineer — 2 people to build a fixed scope app for now, but will likely evolve into fractional retainer after that.

• React.js Engineer — To build the web functionality of the above mentioned app. Also project based for now.

• Backend Engineer (Node.js + AWS) — To build the whole backend of the app from scratch. Also project based for now.

• QA Engineer — With experience in both manual and automated testing, in a mobile app context. Fractional and project based.

• AI Engineer — With experience building AI agents and genAI-enabled features. Experience in fintech or risk scoring more broadly would be great too. Fractional at first, but should evolve into full time soon.

• Mobile Engineer (iOS) — To take over the development of a native iOS app. Fractional.

If you’re interested in any of these roles, simply drop me your CV/linkedin and a quick intro paragraph, as a reply to this newsletter email (or a DM on X/Linkedin).

These are just a few remote opportunities, there’s thousands more out there in remote startups. Only this week I saw 160k+ new jobs being ingested at Jobs Copilot, at least 55k of those are remote jobs.

This is how the JobsCopilot works:

1/ Your auto-application profile

Once you switch to the Premium plan, you’ll be prompted to fill in a profile section with your replies to common demographic questions found in job application forms:

2/ Your auto-apply flow

Besides that initial setup, you’ll now find this new button in the jobs card. Just click the “Auto Apply” button on the jobs that are relevant to you, and that will trigger the auto-apply backend flow (no application is sent before your final revision):

3/ Application form is fetched and pre-filled for you

All jobs you’ve ticked “Auto Apply” are moved to the “Jobs to Apply” tab. And for each of them our backend pulls the application form, and our AI generates replies to each of the form questions based on the job description and your profile. Within a couple minutes you can find the pre-filled job application form in each job card:

4/ One-click confirmation

For now, I’m requiring you to review and click this submit button for every job, as I want you to feel in control of your applications, and I want to capture feedback on quality of this flow. I might make it more automated upon some configs in the future.

Once you submit a job for Auto Apply, the copilot will submit your application in the following minutes/hours (depending on work load). You’ll get these messages on your email on a frequent basis, like I’m receiving on a daily basis:

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover

I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I fleshed out my principles and processes to hire and manage my remote teams around the world, from the podcast interview with Aakash Gupta

Today, I’m replying to a question that I’m getting asked more and more in recent months:

• “Will AI tools replace Software Developers?”

This applies to remote workers, of course, but more broadly to any Software Developer. In fact, it probably applies to anyone who works a digital job.

This generative AI wave has taken the world by storm, and many companies have launched products whose marketing collateral promises to replace a certain professional category entirely, just like Devin promised to replace Software Developers.

Today, I’m using historical data to show you all what I believe will happen to Software Engineers in the coming years.

Let’s start with the counter intuitive case of ATM machines. When ATM machines were invented, all market analysts predicted that the bank teller job would disappear within a few years. And ATM machines did replace several functions that used to be done by (human) bank tellers, but not all. As a result, ATM machines made it cheaper than ever to open new bank branches, which accelerated market growth. And this caused the net number of bank teller jobs grew massively after ATM machines were invented:

As Gergely Orosz puts it in his tweet, some jobs were actually replaced by past technological breakthroughs (eg: elevator operator). But others were actually enhanced (eg: accountants). Indeed, innovation can both reduce and increase jobs:

I actually dug into the data for the Excel invention, and it’s impact on accountant jobs. Data shows that the net number of jobs with title “Accountant” grew massively, and that new job titles appeared, such as “Management analysts” and “Financial managers”. However, other jobs disappeared, such as “Bookkeeper”:

This resulted in a reduction of the jobs that required crunching the numbers (that’s what excel is best at), and an increase in new jobs that required analysing and doing further work with the crunched numbers (analysts, etc).

I see a clear parallel with what tools like Cursor, Github Copilot, ChatGPT, etc will do to the Software Developer job and beyond. Jobs that require simply writing code will be exposed to being mostly replaced by these tools, if anything our scope of work will be reduced to defining requirements and reviewing output.

However, the net number of jobs created could be vastly superior, since suddenly the barriers to produce software are lower than ever. Just like excel reduced the task of crunching thousands of lines of numbers from a few hours manual work into a few second automation. Cursor is doing the exact same thing to writing software code, used to be a few hours of typing, now it’s often just a tab key and boom, the code is there.

I think this will lower the cost of producing software, and that will create a huge explosion in the number of startups. This will likely mimic what happened to bank tellers after the ATM machine was invented. An explosion in the number of startups will create a net growth in software developer jobs. We won’t be writing so much code, but we’ll do lots of technical documentation to be included in the prompt, we’ll be reviewing the AI’s code, and we’ll be doing all the interpersonal functional activities that are needed for a product to be delivered successfully.

I’m an optimist, and I’m very bullish. I think we’re living the most fascinating time ever. Lot’s of opportunity happening right now.

I’m seeing this startup explosion from the frontlines. As a Fractional CTO I’m having more clients than I ever had in the past, and I’m hiring at most of them. As usual, DM me if any of these opportunities interests you:

Opportunities to work with me

• React Native Engineer — 2 people to build a fixed scope app for now, but will likely evolve into fractional retainer after that.

• React.js Engineer — To build the web functionality of the above mentioned app. Also project based for now.

• Backend Engineer (Node.js + AWS) — To build the whole backend of the app from scratch. Also project based for now.

• Python Engineer — Lots of experience with API integrations and data flows at decent volume is required. Experience with AWS is a nice plus. Experience in fintech or risk scoring more broadly would be great too. Fractional at first, but should evolve into full time soon.

• AI Engineer — With experience building AI agents and genAI-enabled features. Experience in fintech or risk scoring more broadly would be great too. Fractional at first, but should evolve into full time soon.

• Smart Contract Engineer — Especially EVM networks, so decent Solidity experience required. Experience with Typescript would be great too. Fractional.

• Mobile Engineer (iOS) — To take over the development of a native app. Fractional.

If you’re interested in any of these roles, simply drop me your CV/linkedin and a quick intro paragraph, as a reply to this newsletter email (or a DM on X/Linkedin).

In case you’re looking for a new job, have a look into JobsCopilot and the Remote Jobs Braintrust. Hundreds of people are using my tools to find jobs, and I’m happy to help as many people as possible.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover

I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I dove into the data proving that remote work is thriving, with offices in the US getting emptier than ever. In fact, startups are now remote by default, as I’m observing from my first row seat, talking with Founders every week.

Today I’m fleshing out my interview with Aakash Gupta, on his podcast. In this 2-hour interview I expand on my management principles, how I hire remote workers, how I build tech products and how I help startups as a Fractional CTO. I think it’s one of my best interviews to date, in case you want to dig in.

Aakash is a great interviewer, and he got me to expand a lot on remote work principles, nuances and caveats. This makes up for a blueprint on how I hire and manage my remote teams, so I’m expanding on it below.

If you’re a manager of remote teams, you can use these principles in your own job. If you’re a remote employee, you’ll find lots of touchpoints that you can apply.

In case you’re on the market looking for a remote job, I’m actually hiring quite aggressively right now, so you can find some open roles at the end of this newsletter. FYI, since the start of 2025 I’ve hired 4 readers of this newsletter into my teams, it’s already my best channel. Very exciting times ahead!

So, here’s some principles and processes that I use in my daily work as a Remote CTO:

1/ Startups are remote-by-default because it’s more financially efficient

Most U.S. startups can’t afford local salaries, so they look overseas. There are good and experienced Software Engineers everywhere: LATAM, Europe, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, I’ve personally been hiring remote workers in all these places for the last decade, mostly to work at US startups. And it’s a win-win: companies have a less expensive engineering team, and great professionals around the world land jobs that pay well above their local salaries.

For early-stage startups, hiring remotely is actually a survival mechanism. Remote means not paying expensive office space. Also, no geographic limitations. means much faster time-to-hire and usually much lower salary costs than in the US. Same applies to other high cost locations, like UK, Switzerland, and most of Europe.

2/ The evolution of hiring/onboarding remote team members

A few trends I’m seeing in remote work, and applying first hand in my own teams:

• Shorter hands-on interviews
Forget the 7-round whiteboard interviews. The best remote teams today use small trial projects instead. For example, pay a new software engineer for a month to work on a product flow. If it works out, extend an offer to continue longer term. Less time wasted, more real-world evaluation.

• Fractional and part-time Hiring
Many startups are hiring people on part-time or fractional contracts before committing to full-time. This is great for both sides, companies can hire experienced folks on these flexible arrangements, and employees can test the waters before committing.

• The “ghost employees”, as Aakash asked
These stories of over-employment (people working two or more full-time remote jobs in parallel) make some people have trust issues in remote work. I’m quite suspicious of this practise, though. In my opinion such thing might go unnoticed in a big company, but in small startup teams of 5–15 people, it’s impossible to hide, if you’re not delivering, the whole team feels it within days.

All these things have one principle in common: outcome-based management. As in: I don’t care if you use AI tools or work at weird hours or work part time. If you consistently deliver good work on time, we’re good. If things slip, we’re not good.

3/ Managing time zones and meetings

One of the biggest concerns about remote teams is: “How do we replace that in-office magic?” — As Aakash asked.

My answer was to use remote-first processes and make them async-first whenever possible. Such as:

• Using Miro boards to replicate a shared whiteboard. Everyone can add sticky notes, diagrams, and comments.

• Replace daily standups with asynchronous Slack/Notion updates, no need to force 9am calls across time zones.

• Keep meetings purposeful and rare. If you force daily standups across wildly different time zones, you’ll burn people out. I prefer fewer, higher-impact sync calls that are actually relevant.

4/ The (apparent) return-to-office trend

I say apparent because last week we saw that offices are actually emptier than ever. Still, may big tech companies like Amazon and Google are forcing people back to the office. Their official reasoning is“Better collaboration”. However, the actual real reasons are often:

• They have massive office leases to fill.

• They want some employees to quit voluntarily rather than relocate.

• They’re testing different ways to control company culture

From my experience, remote work is just as productive (if not more) than being in an office. The key is to adapt processes and goals accordingly and build a remote culture around those.

5/ My take on mental health in remote work

One real challenge of remote work is isolation. When you work in an office, social interactions happen automatically. When you’re remote, you need to be intentional about it.

But here’s the thing: your employer shouldn’t be your social life. If your only friendships come from work, that’s a bigger issue. Hear me out loud and clear:

• The fact that people have delegated their social life on their workplace for decades is a bug, not a feature.

Building a community outside of work is a key responsibility of any human being. You’re accountable to make friends, take hobbies, practise sports and take care of your health. You should never delegate that to your employer, regardless if you’re remote or in the office.

I think this was mostly it. I’ll be diving deeper into each of these topics in future newsletters and on X and Linkedin, as usual.

Opportunities to work with me

• Backend Engineer (Python), preferably with Fintech background and good AWS experience — Fully remote — Fractional now, Full time in a few months

• AI Engineer, with experience in LangChain agents and RAG pipelines — Fully remote — 2 opportunities: 1 Project based + 1 Fractional

• Mobile Engineer (iOS) — Fully remote — Fractional

• Blockchain Engineer (Solidity) — Fully remote — Fractional

• Frontend Engineer (React) — Full remote (preference for LATAM timezone) — Fractional

If you’re interested in any of these roles, simply drop me your CV/linkedin and a quick intro paragraph, as a reply to this newsletter email (or a DM on X/Linkedin).

In case you’re looking for a new job, have a look into JobsCopilot and the Remote Jobs Braintrust. Hundreds of people are using my tools to find jobs, and I’m happy to help as many people as possible.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover

I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I told you my predictions for 2025, on technology, startups and remote work. There’s good and bad stuff happening, and I feel there’s lots of opportunity up for the grabs.

Today let’s use facts to dismiss the mainstream narrative that remote work is over and that all companies have returned to the office. That’s false.

The reality is that offices are emptier than ever, as millions work remotely every day. As of today, 32% of all offices in San Francisco doesn’t have a lease, and the US average is 20%. I estimate that about half office seats are empty on a normal work day. Those people are working remotely.

However, we occasionally have market studies unveiling the actual truth: Office occupancy is at it’s lowest level ever. Like this recent study by Moody’s and Axios:

In San Francisco, the epicenter of the tech startup culture, one third of all offices doesn’t have a lease. And the trend is growing rapidly, as per this recent study from the Financial times.

I’ve added 2 different legit sources because all media buzz tells us that remote work is dead and all companies returned to the office. Nope, that’s false, offices are emptier than ever.

And mind you that both of these studies are about US offices without a lease. These vacancy figures would be much higher if we’d also count in the offices that have a lease but are not being used, or those being used below their capacity. My finger-in-the-air estimate would be that over 50% of office seats in major US cities are empty on a normal work day. Probably a similar trend is happening in most other major cities around the world.

The future of work is happening right now, and let me tell you my views on it:

1/ Remote work

There’s no escape. Despite many companies having returned to the office in recent years, there are also many others that continued working remotely. It’s estimated that over 25 million people in the US work remote.

For many Big Tech companies this actually means hybrid work cultures, with some days in the office and some days at home. But for startups it means fully remote, since most of those companies don’t even have a physical office.

There’s also reports of companies laying off employees in HCOL areas (such as US cities), and hiring the same roles abroad (such as India or Mexico). That’s the case with many startups and scaleups, but also big tech companies like Google, or even non-tech gigantic companies like the UnitedHealth Group. While in such enterprises many of these roles abroad are still office based, it’s a good indicator of a broader trend that US companies are hiring people in LCOL areas, many of which are indeed remote.

2/ Return to the office was never about productivity

So, if so many well accomplished large companies, as well as growing startups are remote, it means that remote work isn’t a blocker to innovation, collaboration and overall business success.

This makes it clear that most companies pushing people back to the office do it for a mix of reasons, none of them related to performance or productivity.

Many enterprise companies have massive sunk cost already invested in decades-long office leases, they move back in since they’re paying anyway.

Many of these companies also have a managerial culture that enjoys feeling in control over their employees. Many middle managers struggle in remote work because they don’t “see” people, and they’re constantly booking meetings with everyone.

Besides that, many big tech companies are reducing headcount, and they figured that forcing people to move closer to the office and to commute everyday is actually a good trigger for many to resign on their own. I think this is lame, since the best employees are the ones leaving first, as they have better employment options.

This last point is the very reason why we hear more buzz about return to the office mandates, than we hear about companies that thrive while working remote. Those returning are the ones that have something to announce, and they do it with a big buzz.

3/ Massive opportunity for Startup Founders

This is a unique time for people who decide to create their own company. There’s never been a time of such abundance for Startup Founders. The cost savings of not having an office, hiring remote employees in LCOL areas, coupled with the powerful AI tools that have flooded the market in recent years. Founders can build a product and make their first revenue faster than ever. Also, they can build a long lasting remote team for a fraction of the costs of salaries plus office space in the Bay Area.

There’s a record number of boostrapped startups, meaning that many Founders don’t need to raise VC funding to pay the costs of growing their business. This fact alone is a huge unlock, since lack of funding would kill most early stage startups, many of them even before starting.

The fact that so many people and companies operate remotely has also dismissed the stigma that used to exist in the past. I remember that 10 years ago I’d need to fly to London, or San Francisco, or wherever clients and investors’ offices were. Nowadays is table stakes to jump on a zoom call with anyone anywhere, and this is especially impactful for B2B startups, which now enjoy much lower sales/marketing costs early on.

4/ Massive opportunity for employees too

You see layoffs and return to the office mandates and you might get anxious. However, I see huge opportunities for employees too.

And I’m not just talking about employment and salary. Certainly, people in LCOL areas can get remote jobs in high salary regions (my case for the past 10 years), as well as many people in those high salary regions can move to LCOL areas and improve their lifestyle. I reckon most of those roles are competitive to get.

However, I think the biggest opportunity is that the cost of having side projects decreased massively. You no longer need to trade off between keeping your job and building that new thing that you’ve been thinking of. Using AI tools and/or some offshore contractors, you can spend a fraction of the time and money you’d spend in the past.

This is massive for learning, since you can build projects that will increase your odds of landing a high paying remote job, or simply get a promotion in your job. It’s also massive for networking, since you can build in public or open source and get attention from future employers or clients.

But it’s a great opportunity for earning as well. You can build a product that gains client adoption and becomes your future growing startup. I also see many people doing this as contractors for others, as in moonlighting on the side of their full time job as they build someone else’s product.

I’m an optimist, I have the privilege of working with exciting early stage US startups every day. All of them are fully remote, and my teams are composed by people spread across all continents, working from home. I love it, and since I’m actively hiring a bunch of roles, I’m adding them below. Reply to this email if you’re interested:

Opportunities in my teams

• Backend Engineer (Python), for ETL data flows, LLM integrations, and automation at large — Fully remote — Fractional

• AI Engineer, to build AI Agents and RAG pipelines — Fully remote — Project based

• Backend Engineer (.Net), ideally with some experience in blockchain architectures — Remote in Europe/LATAM — Fractional

• Mobile Engineer (iOS) — Remote in Europe/LATAM — Fractional

• Mobile Engineer (Android) — Remote in Europe/LATAM — Fractional

• Smart Contract Engineer (Solidity) — Fully remote — Fractional

• QA Engineer (mobile apps and crypto wallet flows) — Fractional

If you’re interested in any of these roles, simply drop me your CV/linkedin and a quick intro paragraph, as a reply to this newsletter email (or a DM on X/Linkedin).

In case you’re looking for a new job, have a look into JobsCopilot and the Remote Jobs Braintrust. Hundreds of people are using my tools to find jobs, and I’m happy to help as many people as possible.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover

I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I told you about my New Year resolutions for 2025. I reckon I’ve dived headfirst into a busy start, onboarding new clients, and kicking off the year with existing ones, as a Fractional CTO.

There’s very exciting stuff going on, I’m hiring several positions for different clients, all remote, some full time and others Fractional. I’m posting a few opportunities below, at the end of this newsletter. Check them out.

In today’s newsletter, I’m laying out my predictions for 2025, in tech, startups and remote work. I think we’re living through a time of deep transformation of our industry, with lots of opportunity, but also lots of change.

These are my 5 top predictions for this year:

1/ An explosion of new startups being founded

AI tools like Cursor, V0, and even ChatGPT, coupled with no-code workflow tools like Zapier are lowering the barriers for launching new software products and even services. Going from zero to one is more accessible than ever, even for folks without any technical knowledge.

US startups would frequently pay $50k-$100k for the implementation of an MVP, and that would entail a team of several engineers working across a few months to make the product ready for the first clients. Nowadays, for simple products, a non-tech founder can generate working code with Cursor, glue it together with some workflow tool, and have a (barely) working MVP that’s ready to test market demand. This will cost a few hundreds of $$ at most.

This started happening over the last decade with no-code tools, but those would be very limited and required a hard refactor once customisation was needed (usually very soon). Now, these clunky MVPs can last longer, be more customised, and Founders have these AI tools to help them figure out bugs and code feature extensions. It has never been this easy to become a Startup Founder.

2/ More layoffs in big tech

Big tech companies are continuously seeking cost-cutting measures to maintain (or increase) profitability. I see them continue the reduction of managerial layers and leveraging AI to enhance productivity of individual contributors, including Software Engineers, so they can operate with leaner teams.

These tools also allow Software Engineering teams to produce more and faster, which will cause companies to build more sophisticated internal tools which can render many people redundant across customer support, marketing, etc. I see a huge arms race as companies seek to build AI agents and LLM-enabled solutions do achieve these goals. There’s a big hype in all this of course, not all such efforts will create solutions that replace teams, but some will do, and others will partially do it. There will also be companies doing layoffs and hiring new employees at the same time, as they try to realign with their new roadmaps.

Interestingly, many of those laid off from big tech will leverage their experience and become Startup founders, which I predict will be a big contribution to the startup ecosystem growth predicted in point 1.

3/ Rise of the Product Engineer role

Traditionally, tech teams are divided between those who define what and why a product should be built (Product Managers) and those who determine how to build it (Software Engineers). As a continued trend in 2025, we’ll see these roles converging more and more. This will result in Product Engineers who have both product vision and technical execution skills.

While most companies won’t officially create this new title, it will be a common expectation from most Software Engineers, Product Managers and other adjacent roles in between. In contrast, Managers who can’t execute will continue being easily made redundant. And Engineers who can only write code will be competing against code generation tools like Cursor (they’ll win for now, but it’s an uphill battle as LLM models become continually better).

The natural evolution of any Software Engineer is to gain awareness of the product they are building, the client who’s going to buy it, and the underlying business opportunity that this unlocks. Simlarly, the evolution of a Product Manager (or any business stakeholder for that matter) is to learn how to leverage these powerful new tools to execute on their product vision and business goals.

This hybrid role will reduce average team sizes across tech, reduce process complexity, reduce time spent in meetings, etc. Teams become more lean and fast paced, not just in startups, but as a global expectation.

4/ The big remote work divide continues

Big tech has returned to the office in mass, their culture in 2025 is exactly the same it was in 2019. They haven’t changed learned how to operate remotely, and reverted to the old way of doing things. Many people left because of this, as they seek remote work opportunities, while others are ok or even excited to return to the office culture they’ve always known.

On the other hand, Startups are remote by default. I’m seeing this since 2021, Founders don’t long for the office costs, and they’ll continue preferring to hire them remotely, especially in countries with low cost of living. The barriers didn’t only reduce on the tooling size, remote work allows Founders in high cost of living regions to hire in more affordable places and skip office lease costs altogether. It’s cheaper than ever to start a business. And what I’m seeing as a Fractional CTO is that startups continue their remote culture even after they are funded and/or profitable and as the team grows. The costs and risks of moving into an office are huge (main one being that most of the team would leave), and for most startups I work with there’s simply no need to do it. They have a healthy remote culture, they are building product that clients happily pay for, and they just continue doing that as they grow.

Interestingly, this same divide applies to the adoption of AI tools. Many enterprise companies are banning these tools, and on the other hand I see many startups pushing people to use them and paying those expenses and a performance boost for their teams.

5/ Normalisation of Fractional Jobs, Fractional careers and teams composed of Fractional workers

I’m seeing lots of new projects in this space (some not public yet), from job boards, communities, recruiting agencies, etc. Interesting times ahead.

There’s huge appetite from the talent side (I have dozens of people in my DMs every week asking questions about leaving their full time job and trying a fractional career). There’s still lack of awareness from most companies, but I see significant momentum especially in startups (where limited funding pushes Founders to hire experienced professionals on a part time basis, rather than full time).

If it proves anything, I’m having the highest demand ever for my Fractional CTO services, and I’m working at startups where all or most of the team is engaged on a Fractional basis, both C-levels and individual contributors. This wasn’t a thing at all just a few years ago.

Now, opportunities in my teams (or teams close to me)

As I said above, I’m now hiring for several clients, several opportunities, most of them don’t yet have a public job description:

• Backend Engineer (Python), for ETL data flows, LLM integrations, and automation at large (2 different opportunities) — Fully remote — One full time, another Fractional

• AI Engineer, to build AI Agents and RAG pipelines — Fully remote — Project based

• Backend Engineer (.Net), ideally with some experience in blockchain architectures — Remote in Europe/LATAM — Fractional

• Mobile Engineers for both native Android and native iOS apps — Remote in Europe/LATAM — Fractional

• Frontend Engineer (React.js) — Fully remote — Fractional

• Smart Contract Engineer (Solidity) — Fully remote — Fractional

• QA Engineer (mobile apps and crypto wallet flows) — Fractional

If you’re interested in any of these roles, simply drop me your CV/linkedin and a quick intro paragraph, as a reply to this newsletter email (or a DM on X/Linkedin).

In case you’re looking for a new job, have a look into JobsCopilot and the Remote Jobs Braintrust. Hundreds of people are using my tools to find jobs, and I’m happy to help as many people as possible.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover

I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Today let me tell you about my views on Fractional careers. And the absolute chaos that is my top funnel at the moment, with multiple startup Founders reaching out every week.

As you probably know, I’ve worked remote as a Fractional CTO for several years. But the ways clients find me, and their awareness about this whole Fractional work arrangement has changed massively.

A few years ago, most startup Founders wouldn’t know what a Fractional CTO was. The conversations usually derived from a full time CTO opening, and I had to educate them on the benefits of investing the same budget to hire a more experienced CTO on a fractional basis, instead a full time CTO with less experience.

Nowadays, most Founders who reach out to me already know:

• What a Fractional CTO is

• That they want to hire a Fractional CTO

• That they want to hire me

This is a huge privilege that I’m still learning how to process. In a call this week I asked a client how he had found me, and he said:

• “I attended the SaaStr conference a couple months back in San Francisco, and in some networking booth there, a few other founders were talking about you, and the benefits of hiring a Fractional CTO. I decided to reach out to you.”

I couldn’t make this stuff up in my wildest dreams. Imagine a group of Founders in SF, at one of the most important Startup conferences talking about me, a guy sitting in my home office in Lisbon.

I must reckon that they probably were not talking about “me”. They were likely talking about the content I write online every day about being a Fractional CTO, and how I help startup founders. Especially non-technical first time founders, who are prone to making several mistakes that many times cost them their startup, very sadly.

I’ve been seeing more and more:

• Published Fractional CTO job openings in job boards

• Founders posting on Linkedin and X that they are looking for a Fractional CTO

• Mentors at startup accelerators suggesting their mentees to hire a Fractional CTO

Interestingly, several instances of each of this end up in my DMs through someone in my network who sees it and loops me in with those Founders.

A few months ago I wrote this article about startups being remote by default, and increasingly hiring Fractional talent. This forecast is proving true.

Eg: For a few months now, I’ve been working as a Fractional CTO at BrightCheck. We’re a team of 12 and almost everyone is on a Fractional capacity. It’s not just the tech folks, also marketing, sales, finance. Most employees are on fractional engagements like myself.

The speed at which we’re closing B2B clients, onboarding them, iterating on the product and underlying data models is incredibly mature. I’m loving it, and more startups should take this route!

In fact, given this crazy demand I’m experiencing for my time, I’ve now split my engagements into 2 broad categories:

1/ Startups post product-market-fit:

Usually these startups have a product and a team, they’ve gone from 0 to 1. However, founders think that their current setup won’t take them from 1 to 100.

They hire me to nurture a more mature tech team, upgrade the engineering standards, and create more robust architectural foundations for the growth of their product and client adoption.

These engagements are usually a monthly retainer, ranging between 8 and 20 hours per week. And I don’t take more than 2 of these clients at a time.

2/ For startups pre product-market-fit

Usually these startups need to build the first version of their product, and my initial job with the founder is to massively descope anything that’s not key for the MVP. That’s a couple weeks of work, in a mix of product management, mentorship and system’s architecture. A lot of fun!

With that thin scope, I invite Software Engineers in my close network to build it, in what’s usually a 1–3 month sprint. A great opportunity for those builders to emerge as lead developers once the startup matures, btw.

I’m hands off for the most part here, but I’m in the loop for whenever that startup “graduates” into a post product-market-fit client that needs (and can afford) me on a fixed capacity.

So, with all this momentum I’m confident that I’m in for a successful 2025. This Fractional CTO life isn’t as glamorous as it may seem sometimes, I’ve suffered a lot from severe anxiety and dry months in the past. As I described in this recent interview, my main goal is to avoid those $0 months like the plague, and that’s what success would look like in 2025. I believe I’ll make it.

For now I’m deciding on which Fractional CTO clients to accept for 2025, from this vantage point of having different offers on the table, plus existing clients who want me to continue working with them. I’m still adapting to the privilege, it’s crazy.

For 2025 I’d like to be more outspoken about my ongoing client engagements, and I’m discussing it with some clients and prospects. I think my clients would benefit from my reach, and also my readers (you!) would benefit from reading some insights on the exact challenges I had, how I solved them, etc while working as a Fractional CTO. Let’s see how this goes.

Besides that, I’ll be announcing some new initiatives for 2025, on my public speaking and on my micro-SaaS entrepreneur parallel careers.

In the meantime, since you read it this far, I have some goodies for you:

• If you want to start your Fractional CTO career, watch the session at the Remote Jobs Braintrust, where I’ve explained my playbook.

• If you want to learn how I manage my remote teams, watch my course Mastering Remote Work.

• If you’re looking for a job, try JobsCopilot.ai, it will help you a lot!

In the spirit of Christmas, I’ve left the Black Friday discounts on. You can check out any of those materials with these steep discounts today still. Go for it!

Talking about Jobs Copilot, I’ve been improving the search a lot. I’ve built a whole new data normalization layer for job titles, skills and many other fields. This should address the feedback about people getting too few results for their search criteria.

Indeed, in a database that’s pulling 250k new job openings a week, some people were getting matched to only a few dozen. That was a result of malfunctioning data clustering, and it’s now much better. Will still improve more until the end of the year. If you’re a customer, you should login and try it. If you aren’t a customer yet, signup today and get 25% off with the code BLACKFRIDAY2024.

In fact, JobsCopilot doesn’t simply find you relevant jobs, it will also auto-apply to the ones you like. This is how that part works:

1/ Your auto-application profile

Once you switch to the Premium plan, you’ll be prompted to fill in a profile section with your replies to common demographic questions found in job application forms:

2/ Your auto-apply flow

Besides that initial setup, you’ll now find this new button in the jobs card. Just click the “Auto Apply” button on the jobs that are relevant to you, and that will trigger the auto-apply backend flow (no application is sent before your final revision):

3/ Application form is fetched and pre-filled for you

All jobs you’ve ticked “Auto Apply” are moved to the “Jobs to Apply” tab. And for each of them our backend pulls the application form, and our AI generates replies to each of the form questions based on the job description and your profile. Within a couple minutes you can find the pre-filled job application form in each job card:

4/ One-click confirmation

For now, I’m requiring you to review and click this submit button for every job, as I want you to feel in control of your applications, and I want to capture feedback on quality of this flow. I might make it more automated upon some configs in the future.

Once you submit a job for Auto Apply, the copilot will submit your application in the following minutes/hours (depending on work load). You’ll get these messages on your email on a frequent basis, like I’m receiving for the past few weeks myself:

As I mentioned above, it’s the last chance to take advantage of the Black Friday discount, simply use the code BLACKFRIDAY2024 on your checkout.

In case you’re interested, I’ve just setup the JobsCopilot Affiliate program. Just signup, share with your community, followers and friends and you’ll get a 30% lifetime revenue share.

PS: If you’ve read this far, drop me a message with your CV. I’m increasingly hiring remote Software Developers for my clients, the market seems to be picking up. I usually post those opportunities in the Braintrust’s private Slack. But in case you aren’t there, just send me your CV and I’ll see it’s a fit to any opportunity I have.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover

I’m Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I wrote the ultimate guide to Remote Work Contracts, for everyone wondering about contracts, taxes and visas, as they look for a remote job.

Today I’m writing a data driven article. I analysed ~250k+ jobs from this week’s scrape of JobsCopilot.ai.

The job market moves fast, and many people are anxious about being laid off or seeing their job replaced by AI. In this article I’m using hard data to tell you the skills that are most in-demand right now.

For the data enthusiasts, the TL;DR of the methodology:

• I scrape the careers pages of ~400k companies (the weekly batch job at JobsCopilot).

• I queried this week’s new job openings from that DB (~250k jobs).

• I filtered out all on-site jobs.

• I clustered jobs that are within Software Engineering, and filtered out all others.

This left me with ~60000 jobs, which I queried to figure out the Top-10 skills of Remote Software Engineers.

However, I quickly realised that Top-10 Skills is actually subjective:

• Some people want to know the skills with highest number of jobs.

• Others want to know the skills with the highest salaries.

So I’m making 2 distinct Top-10 Skills lists, one by number of jobs, and another one by salary. Here they go:

Top-10 Skills (by number of remote jobs)

Here I highlight the skills most frequently required in remote software development job listings.

1. Python
   Appeared in 33.99% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require Python are: SQL, AWS, Java, Kubernetes, Docker.
   Example job from JobsCopilot DB: Platform Engineer @ Lumos ($210k — $240k)
2. SQL
   Appeared in 26.08% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require SQL are: AWS, Java, JavaScript, Kubernetes.
   Example job: ML Researcher @ Launch Potato ($110k — $160k)
3. AWS
   Appeared in 20.67% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require AWS are: Python, Kubernetes, Docker, Java, SQL.
   Example job: Infrastructure Engineer @ Novi ($100k — $150k)
4. Java
   Appeared in 14.56% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require Java are: Python, AWS, SQL, Go, Kubernetes.
   Example job: Software Engineer @ Meronome ($150k — $217k)
5. React
   Appeared in 12.54% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require React are: JavaScript, AWS, Python, TypeScript.
   Example job: Software Engineer @ Invisible Labs ($175k — $220k)
6. Docker
   Appeared in 11.23% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require Docker are: Kubernetes, Python, AWS, Java, SQL.
   Example job: Software Engineer @ EpiSci ($100k — $190k)
7. JavaScript
   Appeared in 10.47% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require JavaScript are: React, TypeScript, Node.js, SQL.
   Example job: Code Wrangler @ Automattic ($70k — $170k)
8. Kubernetes
   Appeared in 9.67% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require Kubernetes are: Docker, AWS, Python, SQL.
   Example job: Site Reliability Engineer @ Bondex ($80k — $120k)
9. TypeScript
   Appeared in 7.89% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require TypeScript are: JavaScript, React, AWS, SQL.
   Example job: Software Engineer @ Cinder ($165k — $235k
10. Node.js
    Appeared in 7.45% of software development job listings. And the most frequent secondary skills in jobs that require Node.js are: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, AWS.
    Example job: Fullstack Developer @ MarsBased (€45k — €55k)

This Top-10 Skills by number of jobs wasn’t a surprise for me, I reckon. Having hired over thousand people through the last decade for Software Engineering roles myself, as a CTO, I know the in-demand skills.

If anything, Python is growing very fast as a result of the ongoing AI wave that demands lots of data work (for which Python is the best tool). Also, Javascript and it’s frameworks (Node, React, etc) while still widely popular, are losing some popularity, and no longer dominate the market as much as in the recent past.

Now let’s see the Top-10 by salary:

Top-10 Skills (by salary)

Here I highlight the skills that drive the highest average salaries in remote software development roles.

1. Verilog
   Average Salary: $234,168
   Median Salary: $242,000
   Maximum Salary: $333,700
   Example job: SoC Design Engineer @ Google ($127k — $187k)
2. PyTorch
   Average Salary: $230,668
   Median Salary: $230,000
   Maximum Salary: $365,400
   Example job: Dataset Engineer @ RunwayML ($260k — 320k)
3. TensorFlow
   Average Salary: $215,427
   Median Salary: $220,000
   Maximum Salary: $385,000
   Example job: ML Researcher @ Splice ($165k — $206k)
4. Rust
   Average Salary: $210,404
   Median Salary: $215,000
   Maximum Salary: $403,000
   Example job: Infrastructure Engineer @ Luminai ($170k — $250k)
5. Scala
   Average Salary: $209,256
   Median Salary: $210,000
   Maximum Salary: $400,000
   Example job: ML Engineer @ Capital One ($140k — $159k)
6. Go
   Average Salary: $207,840
   Median Salary: $205,000
   Maximum Salary: $390,000
   Example job: Software Engineer @ Cloudflare ($137k — $240k)
7. Kotlin
   Average Salary: $205,492
   Median Salary: $200,000
   Maximum Salary: $380,000
   Example job: Software Engineer @ Suno ($170k — $240k
8. Haskell
   Average Salary: $202,678
   Median Salary: $201,000
   Maximum Salary: $375,000
   Example job: Haskell Engineer @ Kadena ($120k — $180k)
9. Clojure
   Average Salary: $201,444
   Median Salary: $200,000
   Maximum Salary: $370,000
   Example job: FullStack Developer @ SIG ($95k — $135k)
10. Spark
    Average Salary: $198,765
    Median Salary: $197,500
    Maximum Salary: $365,000
    Example job: Engineering Lead @ Hubspot ($197k — $316k)

This Top-10 really surprised me. Verilog comes on top, despite being a relatively unknown language for most us, software folks. It’s a hardware description language, used by chip manufacturers, and especially popular in the US. Despite having way fewer jobs than say Python of Java, Verilog has really high salaries which suggests there’s much more demand than supply at the moment.

Besides Verilog, most of the other highest paying skills are related with data analysis and machine learning. This Top-10 is clearly influenced by the hot AI market we’re living in these days. If you’re wondering what’s the next skill you should learn, probably a good call to pick from this list.

Also a quick note: For salaries I used the upper value for the jobs that provide a salary range, thus them looking a bit high in this comparison. Next time I’ll use averages.

This is it, now you know which of your skills are most in-demand, and you also know which skills you should learn next to get to increase your market value even more.

Now you’re ready to search for that remote job you’re dreaming of. JobsCopilot.AI can be your Swiss army knife, since it pulls over 50k remote jobs every week. In fact, the Jobs Copilot finds you the jobs and it also applies on your behalf to the jobs you select. It’s automated by AI agents, you’re in the supervisor’s seat to simply review the application process. No more grunt work scrolling job boards and filling application forms.

This is how the JobsCopilot works:

1/ Your auto-application profile

Once you switch to the Premium plan, you’ll be prompted to fill in a profile section with your replies to common demographic questions found in job application forms:

2/ Your auto-apply flow

Besides that initial setup, you’ll now find this new button in the jobs card. Just click the “Auto Apply” button on the jobs that are relevant to you, and that will trigger the auto-apply backend flow (no application is sent before your final revision):

3/ Application form is fetched and pre-filled for you

All jobs you’ve ticked “Auto Apply” are moved to the “Jobs to Apply” tab. And for each of them our backend pulls the application form, and our AI generates replies to each of the form questions based on the job description and your profile. Within a couple minutes you can find the pre-filled job application form in each job card:

4/ One-click confirmation

For now, I’m requiring you to review and click this submit button for every job, as I want you to feel in control of your applications, and I want to capture feedback on quality of this flow. I might make it more automated upon some configs in the future.

Once you submit a job for Auto Apply, the copilot will submit your application in the following minutes/hours (depending on work load). You’ll get these messages on your email on a frequent basis, like I’m receiving on a daily basis:

Developing JobsCopilot under such aggressive bandwidth constraints has been hard work, but I’m thankful for your feedback, and for all positive messages and engagement from the almost 500 people using it on a daily basis. You truly are an amazing bunch :)

In case you’re interested, I’ve just setup the JobsCopilot Affiliate program. Just signup, share with your community, followers and friends and you’ll get a 30% lifetime revenue share.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover