Was digging through today's live US software-engineer listings and the city breakdown surprised me enough to share.



The names everyone assumes own SWE hiring (Amazon, Meta, Google) aren't leading the featured listings in two of the biggest metros:



• Seattle — 595 open SWE roles. The featured ones are mostly Anduril: Staff SWE, UI Engineer (Lattice C2), Cloud OS. Meta shows up further down.

• Los Angeles — 452 roles. Featured listings are Anduril (maritime / satellite systems) and Northrop Grumman (autonomy, principal SWE).



And the AI-native hiring isn't in SF proper — it's concentrated in Concord, CA, a Bay Area suburb with 509 SWE roles basically run by Anthropic and Scale AI.



For context, the biggest US role by raw volume is Product Manager (14,397), but Financial Analyst (6,908) is adding faster on net today (+18) — driven by Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capital One.



What I'm sitting with: if you're a SWE only applying to FAANG, you're skipping a lot of where the actual req volume is — defense primes, defense startups, and AI-native labs clustered in specific towns.



Are defense + AI-native companies on your list, or is there a reason people still filter them out?

The top software-engineering employers in Seattle and LA right now are defense firms — not FAANG