Not only is it still in demand, I think demand for compiler engineers is growing (and fast) due to the end of Moore’s law, since that means performance improvem

Not only is it still in demand, I think demand for compiler engineers is growing (and fast) due to the end of Moore’s law, since that means performance improvements are mainly (and soon only) happening due to improving software and making specialized hardware, and both of those involve heavy use of compilers and compiler writers. JIT compiled scripting languages and DSLs (domain specific languages) are all over the place, GPUs and the APIs that run on GPSs all need special compilers, embedded processors and custom chips often need custom compilers and/or custom optimizations. There’s certainly a ton of optimization work out there, so if you like designing optimizations on top of existing compilers, you can pretty much pick what kinds of API/software/hardware you want to work on.