It’s been a rollercoaster 12 months for talent in European tech.
The year started with predictions that AI would change which roles were most valuable. Olio founder Tessa Clarke picked out customer support as potentially one of the year’s most valuable departments. As customer support teams “AI-up”, she wrote, they’ll become strategic hubs for operational excellence, customer insight and business growth.
As well as old roles being enhanced by AI, relatively new ones became a must have for startups, including the go-to-market (GTM) engineer. GTM engineers essentially identify problems in sales, growth and customer success functions and use AI tools to solve them.
Another role that European startups began fighting over was the forward deployed engineer (FDE). Pioneered by US Big Data company Palantir, FDEs are software engineers who embed directly with a customer, often on-site, to help identify problems and solve them by deploying their company’s technology in a bespoke way.
On top of that a premium was placed on senior commercial roles at AI startups, with total compensation offers reaching £500k-700k in some cases.
But what does 2026 have in store? Which roles will be the most valuable? And where will founders have to hire most? To find out, Sifted asked the experts.
Mathew Sarre, cofounder, Jumpstart
After founder associates became the norm around five years ago, commercial associates feel like the next breakout early-stage hire for 2026.
Commercial associates combine generalist problem-solving ability with commercial drive. Rather than acting as traditional “smile-and-dial” sales reps executing a fixed playbook, they help founders iterate on the outbound motion in real time — testing messaging, supporting early deals, feeding customer insight back into product — while still hungry to get on the phones when needed.
Typically, these hires have between two and four years of experience and come from a varied set of backgrounds: strong academic profiles with some customer-facing exposure (e.g. in consulting / banking / another commercial role), or having built and run a small business.
This creates a tidy solution to a long-standing early-stage founder problem: “How do I continue to iterate on my sales motion without having to be 100% involved in it all the time?” On top of which, as AI sales tools proliferate and the noise-to-signal ratio increases, it’s increasingly valuable to have someone who can apply AI judiciously, figuring out how the business stands out, rather than simply copying what everyone else is doing.
Laura Wilming, head of talent, Octopus Ventures
In 2026, the rise of AI work slop will need to be addressed, and I think we will see more companies hiring individuals who specialise in how to get the most from AI systems.
This role doesn’t quite fit into business operations or project management — and I also suspect it won’t be filled by one of the most senior people in an organisation. Instead, it’ll be the person who’s spent the most time (probably out of their own curiosity) diving deep into these new tools. As for title: AI optimisation, or AI systems, or AI guru/sherpa?
With AI and a precarious economic and funding environment, companies will also be looking to be as thoughtful as possible about their teams, operations and spending.
Running an efficient and high-performing organisation has long been a desire that will be pushed into actuality, and with that I predict we are going to see a resurgence in the COO: the strategic partner to the visionary CEO, that person who runs the day-to-day of the business without much fanfare or recognition, because everything runs so well that you only notice them when they’re gone.
Finally, I think we’ll see a rise in roles that centre around brand and user research, because at the end of the day it’s the value that a user gets from a product that matters the most. With so many companies being built thanks to new tools, the way that products will differentiate themselves in the market is by making a user experience that stands out and by building a brand that their target audiences can connect with.
Liv Parry, talent partner, Europe, General Catalyst
AI is rapidly changing the way we’re designing teams; it’s becoming less about which new hyped role is coming in like years before (eg. chief of staff, founder associate), and more about how we’re creatively redesigning teams to stay competitive.
What will be exciting is seeing how founders stay ahead of the curve by streamlining teams in a novel way, iterating on team structures as their employees become augmented further by AI.
Roles like forward deployed engineers are here for the foreseeable — although the jury is out on whether forward deployed strategists will be as sticky in figuring out viable go-to-market routes.
2026 is the year to be creative and daring on how founders set their team up. Playbooks are being torn up and rewritten with AI. Founders that lean into that uncertainty will create thriving new cultures others will look to emulate in the future.
Jane Reddin, partner, talent and platform, AlbionVC
A new role is emerging across European tech — the generalist head of go-to-market (GTM). Already prevalent in the US, this role is the founder’s commercial 'Swiss Army Knife'.
Any founder building in AI needs a strong CFO, COO and a generalist commercial leader who can handle execution so they can maintain valuable customer relationships and close deals. Their involvement is vital, but they need to hire thoughtfully around them to avoid becoming a bottleneck.
A generalist head of GTM needs proven success across multiple GTM functions (sales, customer success, marketing, partnerships), with demonstrated ability to operate in ambiguity and with technical depth. Often an ex-founder, ex-consultant or ex-solutions engineer who has seen the full commercial picture but has not calcified into a narrow specialism.
'Prove it' buying behaviour is emerging — customers prefer to start small and scale based on success rather than committing upfront. The sales conversation is increasingly about demonstrating actual customer-perceived value rather than selling against engineering-led assumptions. If a founder steps back from sales entirely, they sever the critical feedback loop between customer and product. In the early stages (and increasingly past Series B), selling is product development.
Product-centric organisations are positioned to win in this era. The tight relationship between customer, commercial teams and product engineering enables adaptive pricing, creative approaches to land-and-expand and genuine partnership with customers as companies scale. This push-pull relationship requires a different team approach than the traditional siloed structure of sales to implementation.
The cellular unit of scalable early-stage startups becomes the founder CEO, GTM generalist and forward deployed engineer — a structure that can be replicated as the company grows. As that happens, each market segment or major customer cluster gets its own unit; the founder CEO role is replaced with a cell leader; and GTM generalists and FDEs operate within each cell, maintaining tight feedback loops.
This structure preserves the integrated relationship between commercial and technical functions that drives success in 'prove it' sales environments, whilst allowing the organisation to scale without losing the founder's original magic, because they still sit at the helm of the boat.
David James, chief learning officer, 360Learning
The chief AI officer is real and it’s not going away. In 2026, tech companies will need one, whether they see themselves as an AI company or not. That said, this role will look far less like a pure tech hire and far more like a business operator.
These leaders will need to know where AI genuinely creates value, embed it into workflows across the organisation and put guardrails in place around ethics, risk and data from day one.
Crucially, they’ll be responsible for building AI capability beyond engineering. That means understanding which roles are changing fastest because of AI, which skills the business will need in 6, 12 or 18 months and where it makes more sense to upskill from within than hire externally.
