Role composition for SaaS companies
We took a deep dive into the world’s biggest SaaS companies and investigated who they employ.
Based on LinkedIn Insights data we give an overview of the team composition of these companies and what we can learn from the insights at an aggregated level.
The top 5 world’s biggest SaaS companies are:
- Salesforce
- ServiceNow
- Square (renamed Block in December 2021)
- Atlassian
- Workday
Average workforce composition of SaaS companies
For the top 5 SaaS companies this is the overall role composition.
Remarkable is that the engineering departments almost account for 1/3 of the entire workforce.
Sales roles cover the second biggest part of the workforce.
IT roles come in second. IT differs from engineering in the sense that engineering is basically responsible for product development and IT supports the organization's own IT processes needed to run the business.
Business development, marketing and product management together account for 12% of the workforce.
Other roles are positions in HR, operations, design, finance and support roles.
Here is the workforce distribution for every individual SaaS company.
Salesforce
Engineering and sales together account for half of Salesforce's organization. It has the biggest 'Salesforce' of all top 5 companies.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow has an equally distributed workforce.
Square
Square relatively has the most roles in 'other roles' which are roles like HR, operations, design, finance and support.
Atlassian
Atlassian has by far the biggest workforce of engineers, almost covering half of the entire organization.
Workday
Workday has a big engineering department.
How this has shifted since the snapshot
These charts reflect LinkedIn Insights data from 2021, so read the exact percentages as a moment in time rather than a live headcount. The broad shape has held up well: engineering still anchors the org chart at the largest SaaS companies, and all five of these firms are still operating (Square now under the Block parent brand).
The more meaningful change is what engineering-heavy now means. Both Salesforce and ServiceNow have moved agentic AI into production products rather than treating it as a research bet, which is starting to reshape the mix between engineering, IT, support and operations roles instead of simply expanding every team at once - Salesforce Agentforce. For recruiters, the takeaway is unchanged: to hire for a SaaS company, expect roughly a third of your requisitions to sit in engineering, with sales the next largest block.
