Sources and method

Hacker News Who is hiring

Every month since April 2011, Hacker News has an "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread where each top-level comment is one employer's posting. This site reads every thread through the free Algolia HN API and counts, for each title, the postings that mention it. A title's share is that count over the month's postings. Months with too few postings (December 2011 had one) are left out of shares. The thread leans towards startups and engineering, so it shows how titles spread, not how many people hold them.

Company job boards

Once a week (Mondays, 12:00 UTC) this site reads the public job boards of 537 data, AI and tech employers on Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever: one request per company, no scraping. Each posting's title is matched to a tracked title; open roles, companies and salaries come from these. A salary appears only when the posting itself states a base pay range in US dollars a year; the median is the middle of those ranges' midpoints.

New titles, first sightings and why

Every weekly read keeps each job-board title the synonym map does not know, with the date it was first seen (1,863 so far). One that reads like a data, AI or tech role and is used by 2 or more companies is added as a new title, marked unverified, until it is checked by hand or appears at 5 or more companies across 2 or more weekly reads. A title's first sighting is the earliest posting we hold for it, from a Who is hiring post or a job board, and it only ever moves earlier. Why a title exists is written from linked sources (the essay or post that coined it, policy, talks); at most one short summary a week is written by a model with search, labelled as such and not checked by hand; otherwise the page says only what our own data shows.

Sources, growing

725 sources so far: 537 job boards and 188 monthly threads, 34 boards added in the last 30 days. Growth counts only boards a run found after 2026-09-25; the seed, the hand discovery and the Who is hiring backfill of that day are the starting point. New boards come from the Glyph company registry and from job-board links inside Who is hiring posts, checked a few each run.

The synonym map

Titles are matched with a fixed list of patterns, so "Forward Deployed Engineer", "Forward-Deployed Software Engineer" and "FDE" are one title. On job boards a posting gets the most specific title (a Staff ML Engineer counts as ML engineer). The spellings counted:

Statuses

• Emerging: First seen in the last two years and still gaining.
• Rising: Share of postings up at least 25% on the six months before.
• Established: Steady share for years.
• Fading: The last year is under half of its best year.

"Took off" is the first month whose 12-month share reached a quarter of the title's best 12 months. "First seen" is the earliest posting that mentions it, linked, even if years passed before it caught on.

New titles

Job-board titles the map does not recognise are kept each week. One model call a week (Gemini, no web access) reads the most common of them, plus a few news headlines from a search API, and proposes new titles. A proposal is kept only when at least two open postings use its exact words; it is published as Unverified with a posting as evidence until checked by hand.

Across Glyph Ibis

Company names and slugs follow the shared registry at companies.fru.dev; company pages link to the same company on the other Glyph Ibis sources.

Disclaimer

Counts from Hacker News Who is hiring threads, read monthly, and public company job boards, read every Monday; a title's share is not the job market's size. New titles found on job boards are marked unverified until checked by hand or used by enough companies over several weeks. Why a title exists is written from linked sources; model-written summaries are labelled. The list grows as new titles and job boards are found. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners. Anonymous usage stats via Google Analytics. Postings belong to the employers that wrote them. Use Suggest a correction on any page.