​What does the 2022 Hardware Acceleration hiring market look like?

Acceler8 Talent COO Mat Ferdenzi reflects on a hardware acceleration industry where companies have to be hugely competitive to keep up to bring on and retain top talent. He sees companies not offering competitive packages or giving great (and speedy) interview experiences being left by the wayside – find out more on this, and average hardware acceleration salaries in our 2022 Talent Report summary below.

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The hardware acceleration industry is starting to really take off. I believe that we are only at the precipice of the hardware acceleration boom for many reasons. Not only because key chip manufacturers are pushing hard for top talent, but because there is a huge amount of venture capital (VC) funding being pumped into startups.

It feels like a real renaissance when it comes to chip startups – there is finally tonnes of innovation and disruption – and it has been a long time coming.

Mat’s Highlights

• The hardware acceleration market is expected to grow from USD 3.12 billion in 2018 to USD 50 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of ~49%.
  
  
• The perfect storm of demand for compute-intensive systems and applications (data centers, drug discovery, autonomous systems, space travel, etc.) applied machine learning research and a worldwide chip shortage fueling a huge demand for all kinds of hardware, software, and machine learning individuals.
  
  
• A massive shortage of talent across the board, and we have particularly noticed the most significant lack of talent with the biggest demand for people with direct experience with machine learning accelerators (due to being a pretty new part of the industry) and even more so for Compiler Engineers.

“It feels like a real renaissance when it comes to chip startups – there is finally tonnes of innovation and disruption – and it has been a long time coming.”

2022 Forecast

• What we’re going to see in 2022 is even more demand for top talent, far more VC funding, and salaries and packages continuing to escalate. Many individuals who never considered jobs working within hardware companies are now having their heads turned due to the sheer amount of innovation currently happening, especially using machine learning.
  
  
• The industry will continue to see a rise in remote working and companies which refuse to conform will not be able to attract top talent and will see a far slower rise in growth
  
  
• This year, I think you will continue you find many people come away from the leading tech companies (both hardware and software) to pursue more exciting challenges in startups. This is due to a few key reasons a) we are on the tail end of COVID-19 and so individuals that joined big companies for security are now feeling more at ease in the apparent buoyant market b) there is plenty of VC funding at small companies so packages can be more competitive c) much more startups, more innovation, more interesting work + quicker pace.

2022 Hardware Acceleration Salary & Market Insights

What has been very apparent from 2021, due to the rise in remote working is that we’ve seen a sharp rise in Silicon Valley salaries being offered across the whole of the USA, forcing other tech hubs (Boston, New York, Austin, etc.) to be even more competitive or lose out on talent.

To give an insight into the current market for hardware acceleration talent, let’s look at some statistics:

What tech is being used?

Where is talent located?