on-call jobs in 2026 — demand, top roles hiring, and related skills
As of 2026-09-19, on-call appears in 680 job postings indexed by Skillenai over the past 90 days — most often required for Software Engineer roles, with demand down 2% vs the prior 4 weeks.
Last updated · 90d ending 2026-09-19
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Frequently asked questions about on-call
+Is on-call in demand in 2026?
Yes. on-call appears in 680 job postings indexed by Skillenai over the 90 days ending 2026-09-19, with demand down 2% vs the prior 4 weeks. It is most often required for Software Engineer roles (35% of Software Engineer postings list it).
+What jobs require on-call?
According to the Skillenai jobs index over the 90 days ending 2026-09-19, the job titles most likely to require on-call are Software Engineer (35% of postings list on-call), Engineering Manager (18% of postings list on-call), Site Reliability Engineer (8% of postings list on-call).
+What skills are commonly paired with on-call?
Across job postings indexed by Skillenai (90 days ending 2026-09-19), on-call most often appears alongside observability, incident response, Distributed systems, Python, Kubernetes.
+Where is on-call most in demand?
As of 2026-09-19, the metro areas posting the most jobs requiring on-call are San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, London, Berlin, according to the Skillenai jobs index.
+How can I keep up with new on-call content and jobs?
Skillenai indexes news, blog posts, and research papers mentioning on-call alongside the jobs index. You can subscribe to a daily email digest of new on-call content from your Skillenai account.
Weekly job postings requiring on-call — last 90 days
Salary distribution
Box = 25th–75th percentile · tick = median · whisker = 10th–90th · USD, annualized
Job titles most likely to require on-call
| Role | Postings mentioning | % requiring |
|---|---|---|
| Software Engineer | 241 | 35.4% |
| Engineering Manager | 119 | 17.5% |
| Site Reliability Engineer | 56 | 8.2% |
| Backend Engineer | 47 | 6.9% |
| Platform Engineer | 19 | 2.8% |
| Software Engineering Manager | 19 | 2.8% |
| DevOps Engineer | 10 | 1.5% |
| Infrastructure Engineer | 7 | 1.0% |
| Full Stack Engineer | 5 | 0.7% |
| Machine Learning Engineer | 4 | 0.6% |
Top metros hiring for on-call
| Name | Postings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | 48 | 7.1% |
| New York City | 47 | 6.9% |
| Seattle | 20 | 2.9% |
| London | 19 | 2.8% |
| Berlin | 14 | 2.1% |
| Boston | 12 | 1.8% |
| Bengaluru | 10 | 1.5% |
| Bellevue | 9 | 1.3% |
| Paris | 9 | 1.3% |
Skills commonly paired with on-call
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How this was computed
Counts derive from the Skillenai jobs index over the 90 days ending 2026-09-19. Skills are resolved against the Skillenai canonical taxonomy, so the same entity is counted whether a posting writes 'Python', 'Python 3', or 'python'. Pages refresh weekly (or daily for the top-50 most-requested skills).
- source
- Skillenai jobs index, deduplicated daily
- entity_id
- b05717afae86ebd6
- data_as_of
- 2026-09-19
- window_days
- 90
The demand, skills, and geo numbers on this page come from the same Skillenai labor market index that powers our API. Use it for compensation benchmarking, hiring-competition analysis, and skill-adoption tracking.
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