Sitting down to help build Damia and Landing.Jobs‘ latest Portuguese tech market report forced me to look at everything I thought I knew and ask: is this still true?
Most of it remains the same essence. Some of it has changed. And a few things challenged assumptions I didn’t even realise I was carrying.
Four years in tech recruitment. Thousands of searches. Hundreds of conversations with engineers, CTOs, and hiring managers.
The market is maturing… and so are the expectations
When I started in this area, the headline story was startups. Today, established enterprise companies are growing their tech teams with the same urgency and a lot more structure. They’re investing in AI-driven products, building out sub-units, and committing to long-term talent strategies. This isn’t the improvised hiring of early-stage companies. This is a confident, deliberate, long-term investment in people.
That changes how we recruit. And it changes what candidates should expect.
Specialisation is no longer a differentiator. It’s the baseline
The profiles we’re being asked to find today look very different from when I started. A backend developer who only codes is no longer enough. Companies want engineers who understand deployments, own quality, and navigate complex infrastructure tooling. Data engineers who can also orchestrate. DevOps profiles with a real development foundation.
The candidates who understand this market evolution and invest in building that range, alongside their set of skills, are consistently the ones companies compete to hire.
Transparency is being asked for loudly
One of the clearest signals from this year’s data: candidates are asking about conditions before they agree to a first conversation. Salary, work model, expectations. Not as demands, but as reasonable prerequisites. The EU Pay Transparency Directive is moving this forward at a regulatory level, but the reality on the ground is inconsistent. The gap between what candidates ask for and what companies are willing to publish still exists. Closing it isn’t just a compliance question. It’s a retention question.
AI is in the room. The recruiter still matters
This question came up throughout the report, and it came up on stage at the Tech Hiring Community Conference. Will AI replace recruiters? The honest answer: no. Not because we’re resistant to change, but because the work we do at its best, reading a senior profile for what’s between the lines, understanding whether someone will land well in a specific team, recognising potential that doesn’t show up in a CV, is precisely what AI cannot yet do.
What AI does well is scale and pattern recognition. What recruiters do well is judgment. The two aren’t in competition. They’re complementary. The risk is not AI replacing recruiters. The risk is recruiters who don’t adapt to a world where AI handles what it handles and then assume their job is done.
What I took from the conference
Co-presenting the report alongside Joana Campos at the Tech Hiring Community Conference was a reminder of why this work matters. These conversations, between recruiters, hiring managers, candidates, and the companies building the market data, are how the industry gets smarter. Not just about salaries or stacks, but about what it actually takes to build a team that holds.
The tech talent market in Portugal is more mature than it was when I started. So are the people in it.
