A year-to-date pulse check on software engineering hiring across 100 tracked defense tech companies — pulled from live LinkedIn hiring signal, not job postings.
Hiring is steady, not slowing. January and May led the year; the summer dip is a reporting lag, not a freeze.
January and May were the two biggest hiring months. June/July are likely undercounted — LinkedIn profiles typically lag a real start date by several weeks.
Six companies are doing half the hiring. The rest of the tracked market moves in ones and twos.
| Company | Hires | Company | Hires |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brain Co. | 17 | TurbineOne | 6 |
| Allen Control Systems | 15 | Turion Space | 6 |
| Onebrief | 12 | Quindar | 5 |
| HavocAI | 11 | AnySignal | 5 |
| Reveal Technology | 10 | Spear AI / Firestorm / Istari Digital | 4 ea. |
| GovDash | 7 | ~85 other tracked companies | ≤3 ea. |
This is a mid-career market. Three in four hires bring 3–15 years; genuine junior seats are scarce.
Average: 9.8 years. Mid-career (3–15 yrs) makes up 75% of all hires.
32% of hires carry an explicit senior-or-above title. This is not junior-heavy hiring.
Generalist software still dominates, but AI/ML is now the single largest specialized discipline.
AI/ML/Computer Vision is the largest specialized category — bigger than DevOps, Full Stack, or Firmware/Embedded individually.
California leads, but this is a genuinely national market — 30+ states and 10 countries.
Plus 2 each in Virginia, Maryland, Utah, and Indiana; 1 each in Georgia, Minnesota, Arizona, Ohio, and Illinois; with the remainder spread across other states in smaller numbers.
Python is the common tongue. AI/agentic skills are rising fast but haven't displaced core infrastructure.
Python leads by a wide margin. AI/agentic terms appear meaningfully but aren't yet dominant; cloud/infra tooling (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform) is more common than any single AI framework.
Most 2026 hires likely land $150K–$220K base; the best-funded names reach toward $300K all-in — still well below Anduril/Palantir tier.
Scale: $100K – $290K+. Base pay only.
Genuine entry-level (0–2 yrs) is uncommon here — only 9% of this year's hires fall in that band.
Median certified wage across all US "Software Engineer" H-1B filings. The FY2026 average (a different measure, pulled up by senior filings) was $149,407 across 30,014 filings — real, DOL-certified wage data, though not defense-tech-specific.
Scale: $100K – $480K. Medians: Shield AI $165K · Anduril $221K · Palantir $250K.
| Component | Typical share | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | 60–70% | The bulk of comp at every stage. |
| Equity | 20–30% | Growth-stage senior options: ~$80–200K expected value, risk-adjusted to ~half face value. Seed/Series A equity carries an 80–90% chance of ending up worth nothing. |
| Cash bonus | 10–15% | Often near-zero at seed/Series A; equity substitutes this early. |
| Sign-on bonus | Rare pre-Series C | $100–300K sign-ons are reported at well-funded AI labs for senior/staff hires — an upper bound, not typical here. |
Sources: U.S. DOL H-1B LCA disclosure data via MyVisaJobs.com (FY2026, "Software Engineer"). Levels.fyi self-reported compensation for Anduril, Palantir, and Shield AI (accessed Aug 2026). Startup comp-benchmark research from Ravio, Standout.work, and topstartups.io. All figures are estimates triangulated from public data — not confirmed offer or payroll data.
• Skills data comes from self-reported LinkedIn profiles — 123 of 148 hires had a skills section.
• Recent months (June/July) are likely undercounted due to normal LinkedIn profile-update lag.
• Role-family and seniority categorization is keyword-based and imperfect at the margins.
• Departures are counted from LinkedIn past-employer end dates — same source, same lag risk, same title-keyword matching. A person counts once even with multiple qualifying moves.
• Compensation figures are estimates triangulated from public data — not actual offer or payroll data.
• Source: Crustdata live LinkedIn hiring signal, cross-referenced against a tracked list of 100 defense tech companies.
Company names link to their website where one is on file. † Raven Black has no standalone company website — linked to its LinkedIn page instead. One additional hire matched to "Scale AI," a company outside this tracked list, and is included in the 148 total but not in the grouping above.
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