Tech Is Shedding 150,000 Jobs. Anchorage Just Posted 20 Open Roles.

Anchorage Digital lists 20 open roles as of this week — a capacity build for the next cycle's infrastructure layer, not a maintenance hire. The roles cluster around trading infrastructure, stablecoin expansion, and security hardening across five jurisdictions, with two positions posted in the last seven days alone. That velocity signals a regulated custodian staffing up for institutional-grade execution while the broader tech sector sheds headcount.

The Application Screen: How Anchorage Filters Candidates

Anchorage runs every application through a two-layer filter: an applicant-tracking system that scores résumés against the job description, then a recruiter eligibility check verifying location, level, and work authorization. The career page promises a response within one to two weeks; in practice, that clock starts only after the ATS decides a human should see the file.

The ATS is not a passive keyword counter. Recruiters and automated screens look for JD-keyword alignment, credible ownership bullets, and eligibility signals — location, level, work authorization, in that order. A résumé that buries impact under tool lists rarely clears volume filters.

Anchorage's funnel is published: 1) Application / résumé screen: ATS + recruiter eligibility; 2) OA or take-home: coding or aptitude depending on level; 3) Technical interviews: live coding, design, or domain depth; 4) Hiring manager / bar: level calibration and team fit; 5) Offer & background. Data from 126 candidate reports shows four rounds total and an interview difficulty rating of 5.0 out of 10. The offer rate sits at roughly 38 percent — about one in three candidates who enter the funnel receive an offer. But most drop off at the skills gate, the online assessment or first technical round, not at the initial screen.

Green flags at this stage: a clear stage list from the recruiter, predictable follow-ups, written confirmation of next steps, interviewers who have read your résumé. Yellow flags: long silence after a strong round without a stated SLA, last-minute panel changes, conflicting descriptions of the role level. Red flags: unpaid "trial work" that looks like free consulting, pressure to resign before a written offer, or refusal to state whether the requisition is still funded.

Nearly every Fortune 500 company now uses automated screening software. Since U.S. employers don't have to disclose when AI reads your file, most applicants still write for human eyes — and get filtered out by the robot. Candidates who pass the first gate don't game keywords. They surface ownership metrics that match the job description's verbs, then wait for the recruiter's email.

The 20 Open Roles: What Anchorage Is Hiring For

The board reads like a map of where institutional crypto is heading next. Roles cluster into four tracks: trading, product, legal/compliance, and security engineering, each with distinct prerequisites. Hybrids are rare; candidates who advance pick a lane, cite a concrete deliverable in that lane, and match the jurisdiction.

Trading dominates the headcount. Eight of 20 openings sit in trading or trading-adjacent functions: OTC Trader (Cayman Islands), Weekend OTC Trader, Singapore, Member of Trading Solutions, OTC Trader (Singapore), Junior Derivatives Trader (Portugal), Derivatives Sales Trader (Portugal), Credit Trader - Prime Finance (Cayman Islands), Member of Trading Operations (United States), and Member of Client Experience, CXM (Singapore). The geographic spread (Cayman, Singapore, Portugal, US) mirrors the 24/7 coverage model institutional crypto desks require. Backgrounds that move here are verifiable: prior OTC desk experience at a tier-one counterparty, derivatives market-making at a recognized firm, or prime-brokerage credit exposure. The Junior Derivatives Trader role in Portugal is the only explicit entry point; even there, the title signals an expectation of exchange-traded derivatives fluency.

Product roles form the second cluster. Four openings, including Member of Product, Tokenization, Member of Product, Trading, Member of Product, Stablecoins Solutions (Miami), and APAC Regional Lead, Stablecoin Solutions (Singapore), demand product managers who have shipped custody-adjacent or settlement-layer features. Tokenization and stablecoins are revenue lines, not abstract interests. The Miami and Singapore postings indicate regional go-to-market ownership. Candidates who advance typically cite a specific stablecoin integration or tokenized-asset custody flow they have taken from spec to production.

Legal and compliance carries three roles: Member of Legal, Brokerage and Trading Solutions and two Member of Legal, Corporate & Commercial Counsel (/ai-jobs/anchorage/member-of-legal-corporate-commercial-counsel-fc156cf0-cd5d-4085-acb4-8a7f69e3f4f0) positions, all US-based. The split (one brokerage/trading specialist, two general corporate/commercial) reflects Anchorage's dual regulatory surface: a federally chartered trust bank that also runs a broker-dealer alternative trading system. Backgrounds that clear here show direct experience with OCC trust charter obligations, FINRA/ATS rule sets, or both. Generalist Big Law associates without custody or digital-asset regulatory exposure rarely progress.

Security engineering rounds out the technical core with two roles: Member of Technical Staff, Security Operations and Member of Technical Staff, Security Engineering, both US-based. The distinction matters. Operations hires come from SOC teams that have handled 24/7 alert triage for custodial key material; engineering hires have built HSM-backed signing pipelines or contributed to open-source threshold-cryptography libraries. Anchorage's security model (multi-party computation, hardware-enforced policy, geographic key sharding) is its competitive moat. Generic cloud-security certifications do not substitute for custody-specific threat modeling.

Custody operations includes one role: Member of Custody Operations, Digital Assets (United States), reflecting the core operational backbone.

Two roles sit outside these tracks but signal strategic direction. Member of People Experience suggests the company is professionalizing its talent function after rapid headcount growth. Business Development Analyst, Stablecoins (US) pairs with the product stablecoin roles to indicate a push for enterprise issuer partnerships.

Geographically, the footprint is deliberate: United States (9 roles), Singapore (5), Cayman Islands (2), Portugal (2), Miami (1). The "Member of" title convention across every role reflects a flat, ownership-oriented org design the founders Nathan McCauley & Diogo Monica have maintained.

Candidate Reactions: What Applicants Are Reporting

Glassdoor data gives the clearest window into how candidates experience Anchorage's process. Interview experience ratings sit at 53.1% positive with a difficulty score of 3 out of 5 — middle of the road, but the breakdown by role tells a more useful story. Candidates interviewing for Associate and Client Services positions consistently rate those loops as the hardest, while Internship and Talent Acquisition Specialist interviews come in easier. That spread suggests the technical and client-facing bars are set higher than the entry-level or recruiting tracks, aligning with the specialized roles on the board.

The company's overall employee rating stands at 3.1 out of 5 across 44 reviews — enough volume to show a pattern, not a handful of outliers.

Applicants are also doing their homework. A widely shared candidate-coaching video (2024) captures the current mindset: job seekers don't ignore Glassdoor patterns, but they've learned to distinguish signal from noise. One or two negative reviews get chalked up to disgruntled exits; five to fifteen similar complaints about the same issue (culture, hours, management) register as a legitimate concern. Timeline matters too. Reviews from 24 months ago may reflect leadership or strategy that no longer exists; candidates are told to weight recent feedback heavier. The advice circulating among applicants is pragmatic: wait until you have leverage (typically after the hiring manager signals interest) then raise concerns constructively. "I saw some negative reviews around culture; what have you done to address this organizationally and has it been successful?" lands better than "your reviews say management sucks." The manager's reaction becomes its own data point: defensive dismissal versus thoughtful engagement tells you more than the review itself.

For Anchorage specifically, the 3.1 rating and 53% interview positivity suggest a company in transition — growing fast, hiring for specialized crypto-native talent, and running a process that's consistent but not yet polished to a high-gloss candidate experience. Candidates who've interviewed recently describe a process that respects their time but doesn't over-communicate. Auto-emails replace personal check-ins; panel interviews replace sequential one-on-ones. That's efficient for the company, and for senior hires who've seen worse, it's acceptable. For early-career applicants used to more hand-holding, it can feel cold.

The broader candidate-experience data reinforces what's at stake: more than 3 million job seekers a month factor candidate experience into where they apply, and companies that nail it see higher offer-acceptance and better retention. Anchorage's current numbers put it in the "functional but not differentiating" tier. If the hiring surge continues (the board shows 2 roles added in just the past 7 days), the gap between process efficiency and candidate perception will either widen or close depending on whether the People Experience hire and the Client Experience, CXM role in Singapore are empowered to fix it. Candidates are watching. They're reading the reviews, timing their questions, and judging the answers.

The Company Behind the Jobs: Who Is Anchorage?

Anchorage Digital was founded in 2017 by Diogo Mónica and Nathan McCauley. The company's first product was a custody platform built on hardware security modules and multi-party computation. By 2020 the team had opened an engineering hub in Porto, Portugal.

The defining moment came in January 2021. Anchorage Digital Bank received a federal trust charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, becoming the first nationally chartered crypto bank in the United States.

Capital followed the charter.

PitchBook lists the headcount at roughly 400 employees. The cap table includes a16z, Blockchain Capital, GIC, and Visa, among others.

The business model centers on an integrated platform: custody, trading, staking, governance, and a prime-brokerage layer called Anchorage Trading Solutions. Subsidiaries extend the reach: Mountain Protocol (Bermuda, 2023) issues the USDM stablecoin; Hedgey Finance (Delaware, 2021) builds tokenized equity infrastructure; Routable (Sunnyvale, acquired September 2026) adds payment-rail tooling for stablecoin settlement.

Competition is dense. PitchBook tracks 47 rivals, including Copper.co (Zug), Chain, Binance Custody, and Bitcoin Suisse.

Recent moves signal the next phase. The Routable acquisition adds programmable payout rails for institutional stablecoin flows. A separate entity, Anchorage Arctic AI Systems, incorporated in Alaska in February 2026, shares the name but operates in a different vertical — AI infrastructure for Arctic logistics. It is not affiliated with Anchorage Digital.

Broader Trends: How Anchorage's Move Reflects Frontier-Tech Hiring

Anchorage's 20 open roles arrive against a contradictory backdrop. Mega-cap layoffs have erased more than 150,000 positions across 549 companies since last year, with another 22,000 cuts logged in 2026 alone — 16,084 in February by itself. Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Intel have all announced reductions in the tens of thousands. Yet frontier-tech capital keeps flowing. Venture investment in the category rose 47 percent year over year, marking its second-best year on record. One in three venture dollars in 2024 went to funds with a stated frontier-tech focus, the highest share in a decade. Hardware-focused funds captured a third of fundraising, up from 20 percent in 2021.

The money is chasing a talent pool that keeps shrinking. Employers posted nearly 1.1 million technology and IT jobs last year. AI, ML, and data science postings jumped 163 percent to 49,200. Security roles surged 124 percent to 66,800. Unemployment for network and systems administrators sits at 0.4 percent. Security analysts: 2.7 percent. Software developers: 3.1 percent. All well below the national 4.3 percent rate. Seventy-six percent of tech leaders report skills gaps. Eighty-seven percent say they struggle to find skilled data science and tech workers. Only 29 percent expect talent availability to improve through 2030, down from 39 percent in 2023.

The most valuable player in the next decade is the bilingual operator, fluent in both technology and business strategy.

Anchorage's posting pattern mirrors the "plumbers" thesis: the data engineers building pipelines, the MLOps specialists managing models in production, the security experts locking it down. The company lists two Member of Technical Staff roles (Security Operations and Security Engineering) alongside custody operations, trading operations, and derivatives traders in Portugal, Singapore, and the Cayman Islands. That geographic spread tracks the global competition for AI and crypto talent that Gartner and others have flagged as a defining strategic contest.

AI integration remains the bottleneck. Gartner finds only one in 50 AI initiatives delivers transformative value. Fewer than 1 percent of layoffs link to actual productivity gains from AI. Yet 64 percent of delayed projects cite AI integration. Sixty percent cite security. Fifty-two percent cite software engineering. Seventy percent of tech leaders say the AI factor alone has made them more likely to turn to staffing firms. Ninety-three percent say those firms have been effective. Anchorage posts directly on job boards (two new roles in the past seven days), but the volume of AI-generated applications industry-wide has Gartner predicting a quarter of candidate profiles could be fake by 2028.

The hiring signal is clear: capital is committing, regulation is hardening, and the talent gap is structural. Anchorage's 20 roles are a small but legible piece of that picture.

What to Watch: Future Hiring and Process Changes

Anchorage's hiring velocity (two new roles posted in the past week alone) signals a company still in expansion mode, not maintenance. The board data shows openings across five jurisdictions: United States, Singapore, Cayman Islands, Portugal, and a Miami-specific role for stablecoin product work. That geographic spread mirrors the regulatory arbitrage baked into digital-asset custody: Singapore for APAC licensing clarity, Cayman for fund-structure familiarity, Portugal for MiCA-adjacent talent, Miami for U.S. stablecoin policy proximity. Each jurisdiction carries its own compliance stack, and Anchorage's product roles (Tokenization, Trading, Stablecoins Solutions) map directly to the product lines that require those licenses.

The next signal to watch is whether the "Member of People Experience" role posted this week translates into process changes. Babblebots, an AI-driven recruiting platform that raised capital from a syndicate including Anchorage Capital Partners, BonBillo, Z21 Ventures, and Ahead VC, claims a network of more than 100 users and clients like Alkem Laboratories, Welspun Enterprises, and IIT Bombay's Development and Relations Foundation. If Anchorage deploys its own portfolio company's tooling internally, the screening pipeline (technical assessment, values alignment, domain-specific case studies) could shift toward automated first-round evaluation. That would compress timelines but also raise the bar for candidates who previously relied on narrative framing to clear human review.

Broader market pressure reinforces the shift. Nucamp's 2026 analysis of Anchorage, Alaska's tech market (distinct from the company but indicative of the talent pool) notes a nationwide pivot from entry-level hires to "production-ready" AI engineers who can deploy mature solutions. Amanda Augustine, a career expert cited in that research, describes AI job growth spreading into energy, healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing, moving away from strictly software-centric roles. Anchorage's own openings reflect that: the "Member of Technical Staff, Security Engineering" and "Security Operations" roles demand infrastructure hardening experience, not just model tuning. The "Credit Trader - Prime Finance" and "Derivatives Sales Trader" roles in Portugal and Cayman require traditional finance fluency layered atop digital-asset rails. Hybrid competence is becoming the baseline.

Wells Fargo's CEO Charlie Scharf offered an adjacent-industry preview in May 2026: "We've got this mismatch, that, as a country, we're going to have to deal with," he said, describing the gap between roles AI can absorb and the workforce that currently fills them. The bank is "actively mulling how to get ahead of that through things such as employee retraining." Anchorage, smaller and faster-moving, may not announce a formal retraining program — but the "Member of People Experience" hire suggests internal mobility and upskilling are on the agenda. Watch for whether future postings include "AI-enabled" or "LLM-augmented" qualifiers in job descriptions for non-engineering roles. That's the leading indicator that the screening rubric has evolved.

Regulatory catalysts could accelerate hiring in specific corridors. The Stargate project (OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank's infrastructure buildout) announced five new sites across Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and the Midwest in September 2025, targeting nearly 7 gigawatts and investment over three years. Sarah Friar, OpenAI's finance chief, told CNBC the campus in Abilene could scale past a gigawatt, enough for 750,000 homes. That compute demand drives stablecoin settlement volume, which drives Anchorage's "Business Development Analyst, Stablecoins" and "APAC Regional Lead, Stablecoin Solutions" roles. If U.S. stablecoin legislation (the GENIUS Act or similar) clears Congress, the Miami and Singapore product leads will likely expand their teams first.

Energy constraints are the wildcard. The JLARC report on Virginia's data center market (the world's largest at 13 percent of global operational capacity) forecasts unconstrained power demand doubling in ten years, with data centers as the primary driver. Dominion Energy residential customers could see $14–37 monthly increases by 2040. Anchorage doesn't run hyperscale data centers, but its custody infrastructure sits on the same grid. If power costs push compute toward stranded-energy geographies (Texas, Wyoming, Alaska), Anchorage's trading and operations footprint may follow. The "Weekend OTC Trader, Singapore" and "Junior Derivatives Trader, Portugal" roles already reflect a follow-the-sun model that could extend to follow-the-power.

Two concrete markers to track: first, whether Anchorage's open role count sustains above 20 through Q1 2026 — a drop would signal absorption of current pipeline; second, whether the "Member of Product, Tokenization" and "Stablecoins Solutions" hires ship product updates within six months. In this sector, hiring precedes revenue by roughly two quarters. The screen gets stricter when the roadmap tightens.

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