Market Insights

Executive Summary: Five Findings

1. AI talent is the new frontier — the most expensive specialism in the market

Demand for ML Engineers, LLM Specialists and AI Platform Engineers has outpaced supply across all European markets. Senior AI professionals now command packages comparable to senior architects and engineering directors. In Greece, the gap between local and remote-for-foreign-employer rates for AI roles has reached 60 to 80 percent.

2. Cybersecurity is structurally undersupplied

The enforcement of NIS2 (October 2024) and DORA (January 2025) created an immediate compliance-driven demand spike for GRC, SOC and cloud security professionals across the EU. Qualified candidates hold genuine negotiating power. Companies that underprice these roles consistently fail to hire.

3. Greek developers are earning European salaries while working from Athens

Remote work for foreign employers has structurally shifted the upper range of Greek IT salaries. A senior backend developer in Athens working remotely for a London or Amsterdam employer earns 40 to 70 percent more than their counterpart in a local Greek company. This is a permanent market feature, not a temporary trend.

4. The freelance economy is no longer marginal

Digital nomads and IT contractors now represent a significant and growing share of available technology talent in Europe. Companies that restrict hiring to permanent employees are excluding a large pool of highly experienced professionals. Understanding contractor rates, legal frameworks and B2B contracting is now a core competency for any hiring function.

5. Salary transparency is reshaping candidate behaviour

Candidates in 2026 arrive at interviews knowing their market value with greater precision than ever before. Community salary sharing and professional networks have eliminated information asymmetry. Companies that offer below-market compensation without a compelling value proposition will consistently lose candidates at the offer stage.

The Three Structural Forces

1.1 The AI Inflection

The emergence of large language models as production-ready technology between 2022 and 2024 created an entirely new category of roles — LLM Engineers, AI Product Managers and AI Safety Researchers — that did not appear in salary surveys three years ago. These roles combine scarcity of qualified candidates with extremely high business urgency, producing compensation levels that benchmark against senior architecture roles rather than mid-level engineering.

Simultaneously, AI is beginning to affect demand for lower-complexity development roles, particularly those focused on boilerplate code generation. This is not a collapse in developer hiring. It is a structural shift toward seniority: companies are hiring fewer junior developers and more senior engineers and architects who can direct and evaluate AI-generated output.

1.2 European Regulatory Expansion

Two legislative milestones directly created hiring demand in cybersecurity and data governance. NIS2, enforced in October 2024, expanded mandatory cybersecurity obligations to a much wider set of sectors across all EU member states. DORA, the Digital Operational Resilience Act enforced in January 2025, imposes stringent ICT risk management requirements on financial entities across the EU. Greece is fully subject to both frameworks, creating sustained demand for security and compliance professionals through 2027.

1.3 Remote Work and the Greek Salary Shift

Remote work normalisation has had a more pronounced effect on the Greek IT market than almost any other European market. The historical gap between Greek local salaries and Western European rates was large. As Greek IT professionals began working remotely for UK, Dutch, German and US employers at international rates, the effective ceiling of the Greek market rose dramatically.

This creates a dual market: local Greek employers competing on local budgets, and a growing cohort of professionals earning international rates while remaining based in Athens or Thessaloniki. The implication for Greek companies is clear — to retain senior technical talent against international competition, compensation strategies must evolve.

Sources: Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024, ENISA Threat Landscape 2024, European Commission Digital Economy Report 2024, iTechScope market intelligence.