Something happens when you sort this week's Seattle board by category and read down the list of who is hiring in each one. The same name keeps appearing at the top.
SpaceX has thirty-seven open roles in infrastructure and platform here. Twenty in security and trust. Sixteen in product and design. Fifteen in AI and machine learning. Fourteen in frontend and mobile. It tops four of the nine categories we track in this region and ties Brex in a fifth, and in the largest one it has nearly four times the roles of the company behind it.
I am not telling you that to sell you on SpaceX. I am telling you because it changes how you should read every percentage I am about to give you. When one employer sits at the top of that many categories, the shape of this market is substantially the shape of one company's hiring plan, and a single decision inside one building moves the whole chart. Keep that in your head for the next few minutes.
With that said, here is the board. Six hundred and thirty-three roles posted over the last ninety days that we could analyse. Infrastructure and platform is the largest slice at a hundred and nine of them. Product and design, seventy-seven. Security and trust, seventy. AI and machine learning, sixty-six. Then it drops off a cliff — frontend and mobile is thirty, engineering leadership twenty, backend and APIs thirteen, data ten, forward-deployed nine.
Those last four are worth naming precisely because they are small. Thirteen backend roles in a metro this size is not a category, it is a handful of jobs, and a share calculated on ten data roles will swing wildly on one posting. Where the count is small I will give you the count and not the percentage, because the percentage pretends to a precision that is not there.
Now the part I would tell a friend first, and it is the strongest thing in this week's Seattle data.
Snowflake has a hundred and thirty-six certified Department of Labor filings in the last twelve months, at a median sponsored wage of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars. A hundred and thirty-six. That is not a company that is open to the idea of sponsorship — that is a company with a process, a law firm, and a well-worn path. If you are listening from outside the United States and you have been sending applications into a void, that is the deepest paper trail in this market by a wide margin.
Behind it: Stripe, seventy-seven certified filings, median about a hundred and fifty-seven thousand. Databricks, sixty, at just under a hundred and fifty. Qualtrics, eighteen filings at a hundred and eighty-three thousand five hundred. Cloudflare, eight, at a hundred and eighty-eight thousand. And OpenAI, twenty-one filings here, at a median of two hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars, which is the highest sponsored wage on this board and tells you exactly what level they were hiring at.
Every one of those companies is hiring in Seattle right now. That intersection — hiring today, and has actually filed before — is the filter most people apply one half at a time.
The other side of the same coin needs saying carefully. Robinhood, IonQ and Rover are all hiring hard here and have no Department of Labor filings we can find from the last two years. I want you to hear the precise shape of that sentence. We looked, and nothing was there. It is not proof they will not sponsor, and small or young companies often sponsor their first hire with no prior record at all. If one of those three is the right job for you, ask them directly and early. Do not cross them off because a podcast told you a filing was missing.
Movement, and Seattle has some genuine local texture this week. OpenAI is accelerating, the sharpest pickup in this market. Tanium is accelerating. Databricks is accelerating. And Nintendo of America has slowed sharply — which, before anyone builds a story out of it, usually means a hiring push is finishing rather than a company being in trouble. I cannot tell those two apart from outside, and neither can anyone else reading public job boards.
Eight employers are new to the Seattle set. I can name six, and they are a strange little group: IonQ, Perplexity AI, Carta, Flexe, Scale AI and Samsara. Scale AI has sponsored occasionally, Samsara actively. IonQ, Perplexity, Carta and Flexe have no filings on record. IonQ is the one I would look at first anyway, on volume alone: twenty-three roles open in this region, which is more than any of the other five new arrivals.
Also on the quieter list, which is usually where the odds are best: Tanium has eleven roles open, Stripe twelve, Cloudflare eleven, Qualtrics eight, Pinterest eight. Those names do not appear on the scraped top-employer lists, so the applications per role are a fraction of what the household names are absorbing.
Now the money, and Seattle's version of this is nothing like San Francisco's. Six companies here have told the SEC they sold stock and posted no roles since — but the amounts are small and local. Panorama Artificial Intelligence disclosed about sixty-five million dollars, sixty-seven days ago. Synapse HoldCo, thirty-six million, seventy-four days. Thira, eighteen and a half million, forty days ago. Noosphere Labs, ten million, two weeks ago. Precision Medical Ventures, seven and a half million, twelve days ago. Edera, six and a half million, forty-six days ago.
A Form D is a notice a company files after selling shares to private investors, and it reports the total sold under an offering rather than a single round — so I say disclosed, and I never attach a Series letter to it. The typical gap between money landing and listings appearing is thirty to ninety days. Four of them — Thira, Edera, Panorama and Synapse — are inside that window right now, which is the stretch where first listings tend to appear. Noosphere and Precision Medical are too early to have written a job description yet, and that is exactly when a specific, well-aimed email has somewhere to land.
Two honest limits before I stop. Seattle shows no layoff notices in the last ninety days, and I am not going to let that stand as good news, because the layoff records this show reads come from California's WARN system and cover California. For this market we are not looking. That is a blind spot, not a clean bill of health.
And we have ten weeks of history here, three of them watched live rather than reconstructed afterwards from job boards. Reconstruction under-counts, since a board only shows what is still open. So take direction from the four-week comparisons and leave the size alone.
The number I have been circling: of those six hundred and thirty-three roles, five were entry level or new grad. Five. A hundred and ninety-one were senior, a hundred and eight staff or above, sixty-five management, and two hundred and sixty-three did not say. If you are early in your career, spend your energy on the six companies that just raised money and have not written a posting yet, and on the four new arrivals nobody has heard of. The board will not have a door for you this month.
One quick thing before the fine print. Everything behind this episode — the Seattle board, the companies I named and the ones I ran out of time for — is at hiringclimate.com. It is free, and it is the same data I read to make this. And if this was useful, like the show or follow it wherever you are listening. That is genuinely how other people find it.
One last thing, and it is about this show rather than about the market. This episode was written by an AI system, and the voice reading it to you is synthetic. The facts underneath it are not: every number here comes from a public filing, a job board or a government record, and it can be checked. But nobody sat down and wrote this, and you should know that before you act on it.