29,998 US roles are open at 1,622 frontier-tech employers, as of November 2, 2026. 23,605 of them are in space, AI, defense and robotics, and the rest at other tech companies and startups. At least 3,498 require an active security clearance, and 21.1% have been up for 180 days or more.
| Sector | Open roles | Employers | Active clearance (at least) | Up 180+ days (at least) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Space | 9,460 | 138 | 1,430 | 9.9% |
| AI | 8,453 | 970 | 114 | 32.2% |
| Defense | 4,183 | 45 | 1,841 | 22.5% |
| Robotics | 1,509 | 66 | 5 | 19.4% |
| Other | 6,393 | 403 | 108 | 22.6% |
| All | 29,998 | 1,622 | 3,498 | 21.1% |
This is the first edition, and a new one follows each month. The data is free to reuse: CSV files on GitHub.
What the data shows
- Three employers hold 23% of the openings. SpaceX, Anduril and Blue Origin list 6,870 roles between them, and the top ten list 34.5%. Below them the field is long and thin: the median employer lists 3 roles, and 417 list just one. AI's 8,453 roles are spread across 970 employers; defense's 4,183 sit at 45.
- Clearances sit in defense and space, at different levels. 44% of defense roles require an active clearance, against 15% of space roles and 1.3% of AI roles. Defense asks mostly for Secret, with 970 of the 1,284 Secret postings. Space asks for TS/SCI, with 779 of the 1,128. Anduril alone lists 1,421 of the 3,498.
- One role in five has been up 180 days or more. Space is lowest at 9.9% and AI highest at 32.2%. Part of AI's figure comes from Y Combinator's job board, but it leads either way: 26.0% on systems with their own posted dates, against 22.3% for defense and 9.5% for space.
The employers with the most open roles
| Employer | Sector | Open roles | Active clearance (at least) |
|---|---|---|---|
| SpaceX | Space | 2,827 | 192 |
| Anduril Industries | Defense | 2,343 | 1,421 |
| Blue Origin | Space | 1,700 | 97 |
| OpenAI | AI | 629 | 17 |
| Shield AI | Defense | 532 | 139 |
| Anthropic | AI | 522 | 16 |
| Databricks | AI | 479 | 22 |
| The Aerospace Corporation | Space | 462 | 293 |
| Rocket Lab | Space | 451 | 94 |
| Relativity Space | Space | 410 | 12 |
| Alpaca Health | Other | 394 | 0 |
| Zipline | Robotics | 331 | 0 |
| Stripe | Other | 322 | 0 |
| Waymo | Robotics | 312 | 1 |
| CesiumAstro | Space | 273 | 5 |
All 1,622 are in the CSV files.
Clearance by level
Counts of open roles, each a minimum.
| Level | All | Space | Defense | AI | Robotics | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Secret | 1,284 | 284 | 970 | 10 | 1 | 19 |
| TS/SCI | 1,128 | 779 | 254 | 75 | 0 | 20 |
| Top Secret | 903 | 326 | 550 | 17 | 0 | 10 |
| Level not named | 117 | 41 | 67 | 7 | 0 | 2 |
| Public Trust | 66 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 4 | 57 |
| Can be obtained after hire | 1,376 | 694 | 653 | 8 | 2 | 19 |
The first five rows make up the active clearance counts above. The last is the employer sponsoring a clearance after hire, so it isn't in them.
Are these ghost jobs?
Every posting comes straight from the employer's own applicant-tracking system. We recheck them daily and close a posting when the system drops it or after 72 hours unseen, and 29,997 of these 29,998 were seen in the last 2 days. That shows a listing is live, not that anyone means to fill it.
So we also report how long postings have been up, by sector and never by employer, because a long-open posting can as easily be a hard role to fill or a standing requisition as a ghost. We count from the earliest proof a posting was up: the system's own posted date, or the day we first saw it. A repost resets some systems' dates, and our Y Combinator tracking starts on March 24, 2026, so each share is a floor.
Y Combinator's job board gives no posted date we can rely on, so its postings count from our first sighting. 39.3% of them have been up 180 days or more, against 18.1% everywhere else, and they make up a third of AI's postings.
Method
Data. Every open US job posting in Zero G Talent's database on November 2, 2026, ingested from employers' applicant-tracking systems. A posting counts as US when its address is, remote US roles included. 1,198 open postings worldwide have no country and are left out.
Measure. Open roles today, a stock rather than a flow. The date we first see a posting isn't the date it was posted, so month-over-month changes start with the next edition, not estimates of past hiring.
Scope. Employers only: federal postings from USAJobs and venture-capital firms' own job boards are out. Each employer, title and location counts once, so a role listed in three cities counts three times and a role posted twice in one city counts once.
Sectors. Each employer has one sector: Space, Defense, AI, Robotics or Other. They come from our classifier, with its errors on the largest employers corrected by hand. The corrections are listed with the data.
Clearance. An LLM parser reads each posting and records the clearance it requires. A named level matches its posting's text 98% to 100% of the time and counts as labelled. "Can be obtained after hire", "Level not named" and "Public Trust" count only when the posting's own text backs the label, because an older parser over-applied some of them. A blank can mean a posting hasn't been read yet, which is why every count is a minimum.
Limits
- Who's missing. Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and L3Harris have no open postings in our data, and Northrop Grumman (205), Boeing (151) and RTX (108) show far fewer than they hire for, so defense and space undercount the big primes. The list leans toward new-space and defense-tech companies.
- Postings, not jobs. One posting can stand for several hires, or none.
- AI is the loosest sector. We checked its 45 largest employers by hand, which hold 4,326 of its 8,453 roles. The rest carry the classifier's label.
- One day. A snapshot, with no trend until the next edition.
See open jobs that require a clearance or pay by company and role. For the next edition by email, get the Zero G Talent newsletter.