The SaaS talent market entered 2026 in a state of persistent imbalance. Demand for product managers, growth marketers, customer success specialists and data-fluent go-to-market professionals continues to exceed the available supply — and the gap shows no sign of closing in the near term. For SaaS companies competing for talent in a tight market, the implications are significant: higher hiring costs, longer time-to-fill, and greater risk of losing candidates to competitors mid-process.
This is not a new condition. The demand-supply imbalance in SaaS talent has persisted through the post-pandemic correction, the rate-driven funding freeze of 2022–23, and the AI-induced restructuring that followed. What's changed is the composition of demand. Roles that were in surplus two years ago — particularly in-house social media and marketing operations — remain soft. But the truly specialist positions have never looked stronger.
Where Demand Is Most Acute
Product management, particularly in B2B SaaS environments, remains the single most competitive discipline in the market. Senior PMs with demonstrable experience in product-led growth, enterprise sales motion or AI feature development are fielding multiple concurrent approaches and regularly command equity packages that rival engineering leads. The driver is structural: SaaS companies cannot compete on product without exceptional product talent, and the pool of PMs who genuinely understand SaaS metrics — activation rates, NRR, time-to-value — is smaller than the market needs.
Customer success is the second most contested category. As SaaS economics have shifted the emphasis from acquisition to retention, the CS function has been elevated from a post-sale support role to a revenue-critical discipline. CSMs who combine technical product knowledge with the ability to manage senior commercial relationships are exceptionally difficult to hire and even harder to retain. Compensation packages that once topped out at £60k for London-based senior CSMs are now routinely reaching £75–85k with performance bonuses attached.
Growth marketing and demand generation round out the top three. The most coveted profiles are professionals who can own a full-funnel acquisition programme — from paid media strategy and budget management to conversion rate optimisation and attribution — and communicate results clearly to leadership. The integration of AI into paid media has raised the bar: candidates who can't demonstrate how they've implemented or evaluated AI-assisted bidding strategies are increasingly screened out at first interview.
"We're not just hiring for today's stack. We need people who understand the underlying principles well enough to adapt as the tools change. That's a harder brief to fill than it sounds."
Geographic Distribution
London remains the dominant hub for SaaS talent in Europe, hosting the EMEA headquarters of many US-headquartered SaaS companies alongside a growing ecosystem of UK-founded businesses. The city continues to attract talent from across Europe, with German, Spanish and Eastern European professionals representing a meaningful share of mid-to-senior level hires.
Remote hiring has stabilised at a new equilibrium. The fully-remote preferences of 2021–22 have moderated, but hybrid working has become a firm expectation rather than a perk. SaaS companies requiring full-time office attendance in London are finding it significantly harder to compete, particularly for roles below Director level.
Dublin, Amsterdam and Berlin continue to develop as secondary hubs, driven partly by favourable corporate tax treatment and partly by the talent pipelines generated by university ecosystems in each city. However, for senior roles requiring deep SaaS domain experience, London still commands the deepest pool.
What Companies Are Offering
Base salary compression — the narrowing of pay gaps between companies — has continued in the wake of the 2022–23 funding reset. The most significant differentiators in SaaS compensation packages today are equity, progression clarity and work environment. Candidates with options are increasingly asking hard questions about equity plan structure, cliff and vesting periods, and the realistic timeline to liquidity.
Beyond compensation, the factors that most commonly tip candidate decisions are: the quality of the team they'd be joining, the clarity of the product roadmap, and the perceived credibility of the leadership. Companies that invest in making their senior leadership visible — through content, speaking and industry presence — convert candidates at higher rates than those that don't.
The Skills That Matter Most
Across all SaaS disciplines, data literacy has become the baseline expectation rather than a differentiator. Candidates who cannot discuss their analytical approach to performance measurement, who can't construct a basic funnel analysis, or who rely entirely on third-party tools to interpret their own data are finding it harder to pass senior screening interviews.
AI fluency is rapidly moving in the same direction. A year ago, demonstrating awareness of AI tools in a given discipline was sufficient to stand out. Today, interviewers are looking for evidence of genuine integration — how a PM used AI to accelerate discovery, how a growth marketer implemented AI-assisted copy testing, how a CSM used predictive tools to identify at-risk accounts.
Cross-functional commercial literacy remains the characteristic most consistently associated with high-performance in SaaS roles. The professionals who advance fastest are those who understand the revenue model, can speak the language of multiple functions, and know how their work connects to the metrics that boards care about.
Predictions for the Next 12 Months
We expect the imbalance in senior SaaS talent to persist through 2026, driven by continued expansion of SaaS adoption in underdigitised verticals — particularly construction, legal, logistics and professional services — and by the ongoing demand for AI-related product capability.
The roles most likely to experience the most significant compensation growth are those at the intersection of AI and go-to-market: growth PMs, AI product specialists, and marketing operations professionals who can manage increasingly complex technology stacks. These roles are difficult to define, difficult to source, and difficult to retain — a combination that reliably drives salary escalation.
This analysis is based on market observation and practitioner interviews conducted between October 2025 and January 2026. Salary benchmarks are indicative for London-based permanent roles.