When the CEO of Shifty Eye Games was looking to hire for three local positions earlier this month, he posted ads for the open spots on social media and was stunned by the response.
Tuncer Deniz, founder of the Calgary-based game studio, didn’t just get a few qualified responses trickling in slowly.
He got an deluge.
“We got thousands of applicants. Thousands,” Deniz said Tuesday.
“It’s crazy. We’ve never seen anything like that. I put out the ad for five days, but in five days we had over 2,000 applicants for those three jobs. . . so pretty incredible.”
The days of Calgary technology companies struggling to find talented workers has clearly reached a pivot point. Jobs continued to be added, yet firms are able to attract skilled employees from both inside and outside the province.
A new report released Tuesday by commercial real estate firm CBRE has Calgary moving up to 15th spot across North America in its annual tech talent study, far above its 34th place ranking at the start of this decade.
The study examines 13 different measures – such as rental and leasing expenses, labour market conditions and development investment – in 75 centres across Canada and the United States, using the data to rank each place based on its advantages.
Toronto was the top-ranked Canadian centre, remaining in third place, with Vancouver ranked ninth, and the Waterloo region in 10th spot.
Calgary, which was in 17th place last year, has moved up to 15th spot, just behind Ottawa and ahead of Denver.
For the third year in a row, Calgary continues to lead the way with the highest growth rate of technology jobs, on a percentage basis, of all cities in the top tech markets.
It posted a 56 per cent jump in tech employment between 2022 and 2025, well ahead of second place Waterloo (37 per cent) and third-placed Nashville.
For a city pursuing economic diversification, there are now more than 80,000 people working in the tech sector in Calgary, with an average annual wage last year of just over $112,000.
“We are a very livable city. I think that’s attracting talent internationally, and then also from other graduates coming out of the Canadian universities,” said Michael Hoffman, CBRE Calgary’s managing director.
“People are attracted here because we’ve got the employment base to move here and be set up with a job.”
According to the report, Calgary graduated about 3,600 people with tech-related degrees between 2022 and ’24. During the same period, the city added more than 28,000 positions, giving Calgary the second highest rate of “tech talent flow” – the number of jobs created minus degrees, trailing only Toronto.
Brad Parry, CEO of Calgary Economic Development, said the study underscores the momentum of the city’s technology sector and the growing number of younger tech workers who are in their 20s.
“You are seeing companies now not having to leave the marketplace to grow and scale and hire the talent they need,” he said.
“People now know that they don’t have to leave this marketplace to build a scaling company.”
Deniz, who formed Shifty Eye in 2019 with three employees and now has about 30, agrees it’s far easier to find staff with experience in developing video games than it was just a few years ago.
He pointed out the company has hired local graduates, along with experienced workers who’d already moved to Calgary from other Canadian cities and international markets, such as from Ukraine.
This trend showed up with the firm’s recent job postings for an animator, a game producer and an environmental artist.
“We have seen a remarkable difference over the last few years, as far as the amount of talent that we have encountered,” Deniz said.
“We’re moving into a new era.”
In the first half of this year, Calgary tech firms attracted $138 million in venture capital investment, down from $195 million during the same period last year. But with 26 deals, it was still the fourth highest among all cities in the country, according to the Canadian Venture Capital Association.
Investment interest is fuelled, in part, by companies that are able to expand and add skilled workers.
For example, Calgary-based Orennia, which is a data and analytics platform that serves power, renewable energy, and data centre businesses, has been ramping up operations in the past five years, growing from the two co-founders to about 160 employees today.
It announced a US$25 million Series B financing round in 2023 to scale up its operations, completed a Series C round last year, and was named scale-up of the year in the 2025 Start Alberta Tech Awards. Last October, Deloitte ranked Orennia in 11th place in its annual Technology Fast 50 list, recognizing the Calgary firm as one of the fastest-growing businesses in Canada.
CEO Brook Papau said the CBRE data highlights the local tech sector’s ability to hire skilled workers, such as world-class software engineers.
“There probably isn’t a particular skill set that we couldn’t find in Calgary,” Papau said Tuesday.
“The city itself is a draw. People love being close to the mountains. They love living in a clean, safe city, and Calgary fits the bill for a lot of people.”
Chris Varcoe is a Calgary Herald columnist.
