This family covers product and UX designers as well as engineering designers, so it spans screen design and physical products. Tool requirements differ sharply between the two, which is why both Figma and CAD appear here.
We analyzed 392 U.S. job descriptions from 131 employers for Design roles. The most requested skills were Prototyping (33%), CAD (26%) and Design systems (14%).
2,575open U.S. roles tracked
5 yearstypical experience asked for
$177,300median advertised pay, from 351 roles that state it
Product & design
Prototyping33%
Design systems14%
Project management13%
Roadmapping12%
Figma11%
User research6%
Agile6%
Hardware
CAD26%
PCB design6%
Electrical systems5%
RTL design4%
FPGA3%
Languages
Python13%
MATLAB6%
Verilog5%
SQL3%
Operations
Root cause analysis8%
Business tools
Excel8%
PowerPoint7%
Data
Statistics5%
AI & machine learning
Machine learning5%
LLMs5%
Generative AI4%
Finance & legal
Regulatory compliance4%
Stakeholder management3%
Updated November 7, 2026, using job descriptions collected since September 25, 2026. Shares show how many of the sampled descriptions mention a skill, so a low share can still be a firm requirement in the roles that list it. We sample a limited number of descriptions per employer so that no single company dominates, and we only report figures backed by several employers. Advertised pay comes from a different group of roles than H1B filings, so the two are not directly comparable.
