We traced the full career history of every 2026 software-engineering hire at the nine neo-primes and scale-ups hiring software engineers the fastest — 956 people, spanning the US, Germany, and Finland. The surprise isn't who's biggest. It's who over-indexes as a feeder once you adjust for size — and how many of these “commercial” engineers quietly did a defense tour first.
Anduril is hiring software engineers faster than anyone — 258 so far this year, roughly a quarter of all 956 across these nine. Two of the nine, ICEYE and Helsing, are European.
About four of five came from the commercial world (left, in accent). But raw counts mostly measure how big a company is, not how defense-leaning its engineers are — which is why the feeder rate in the next section matters more.
| Prior category | Anduril | Palantir | Scale AI | SpaceX | Applied Intuition | Shield AI | ICEYE | Saronic | Helsing | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commercial/other | 134 | 135 | 91 | 68 | 37 | 38 | 31 | 22 | 25 | 581 |
| Big Tech | 71 | 23 | 38 | 16 | 11 | · | 2 | 3 | 1 | 165 |
| Academia | 8 | 30 | 5 | 18 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 2 | · | 70 |
| Other defense startup | 16 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | · | 1 | · | 31 |
| Legacy prime | 20 | 15 | 9 | 7 | 2 | 5 | · | 4 | · | 62 |
| Neo-prime | 1 | 4 | 1 | · | 2 | 1 | 6 | 2 | 5 | 22 |
| Military & gov | 6 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | · | · | · | 20 |
Amazon sent 88 engineers and Northrop 13 — but Amazon employs ~134,000 engineers and Northrop ~31,000. Bigger pond, more fish. To see who's really a strong feeder, you have to adjust for size.
Adjusted for size and checked against a broader set of named companies, there's no single runaway feeder. Amazon — the biggest name in the raw count — lands mid-pack. IBM, the single largest engineering employer we could size, is nearly the most inert of anyone on this list.
| Source | Category | Engineers | 2026 hires (n) | Per 10,000 engineers | 95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zoox | Commercial/other | 1,740 | 4 | 23.0 | 6.2–58.9 |
| Snap Inc. | Commercial/other | 2,660 | 4 | 15.0 | 4.0–38.5 |
| MITRE | Legacy prime | 2,840 | 4 | 14.1 | 3.8–36.1 |
| Epic Games | Commercial/other | 2,391 | 3 | 12.5 | 2.5–36.7 |
| Booz Allen Hamilton | Legacy prime | 8,502 | 7 | 8.2 | 3.3–17.0 |
| The Aerospace Corporation | Legacy prime | 2,487 | 2 | 8.0 | 0.9–29.0 |
| Tesla | Commercial/other | 17,444 | 12 | 6.9 | 3.6–12.0 |
| Blue Origin | Commercial/other | 5,900 | 4 | 6.8 | 1.8–17.4 |
| CACI International | Legacy prime | 4,518 | 3 | 6.6 | 1.3–19.4 |
| Amazon | Big Tech | 134,131 | 88 | 6.6 | 5.3–8.1 |
| L3Harris | Legacy prime | 10,993 | 7 | 6.4 | 2.6–13.1 |
| Goldman Sachs | Commercial/other | 6,351 | 4 | 6.3 | 1.7–16.1 |
| Capital One | Commercial/other | 20,755 | 12 | 5.8 | 3.0–10.1 |
| Meta | Big Tech | 40,879 | 22 | 5.4 | 3.4–8.1 |
| Leidos | Legacy prime | 9,035 | 4 | 4.4 | 1.2–11.3 |
| Northrop Grumman | Legacy prime | 31,072 | 13 | 4.2 | 2.2–7.2 |
| Atlassian | Commercial/other | 7,827 | 3 | 3.8 | 0.8–11.2 |
| Parsons Corporation | Legacy prime | 5,560 | 2 | 3.6 | 0.4–13.0 |
| Microsoft | Big Tech | 95,250 | 32 | 3.4 | 2.3–4.7 |
| Collins Aerospace | Legacy prime | 18,123 | 4 | 2.2 | 0.6–5.7 |
| Big Tech | 86,847 | 18 | 2.1 | 1.2–3.3 | |
| BAE Systems | Legacy prime | 15,539 | 3 | 1.9 | 0.4–5.6 |
| Nvidia | Big Tech | 27,274 | 5 | 1.8 | 0.6–4.3 |
| RTX / Raytheon | Legacy prime | 44,988 | 7 | 1.6 | 0.6–3.2 |
| JPMorgan Chase | Commercial/other | 37,521 | 4 | 1.1 | 0.3–2.7 |
| Boeing | Legacy prime | 43,727 | 2 | 0.5 | 0.1–1.7 |
| IBM | Commercial/other | 87,870 | 3 | 0.3 | 0.1–1.0 |
| Lockheed Martin | Legacy prime | 39,665 | 0 | 0.0 | 0.0–0.9 |
This is a same-methodology rate — hires per 10,000 people in a company's LinkedIn-listed engineering department — not a claim against the whole labor market. Read the n and the interval before the rank. Most rows above rest on fewer than ten observed hires, so their 95% intervals are wide and overlapping: the top of the table is not statistically separated from the middle of it. What the data does separate cleanly is the bottom — Boeing, IBM and Lockheed sit below every other row even at the top of their intervals. “The companies we've sized” is the honest scope, not every company an engineer could work for. Judged this way, Amazon (6.6 per 10,000, on 88 observed hires) sits mid-table, not at the top. The more interesting pattern isn't one company — it's a category. See below.
Aechelon Technology, a 30-person simulation and training contractor, sent 9 engineers into this cohort — roughly 30% of its entire engineering staff. Vannevar Labs (58 engineers) sent 4. Both would top this table by a wide margin, but at that scale a handful of hires isn't a rate, it's an anecdote — too small to compare on the same axis as Amazon or Lockheed, though notable on its own terms.
Judge these hires by their last job and 14% came from defense. Look at their whole careers and it's about 1 in 5 — defense tech is quietly rehiring its own alumni after Big Tech trains them up.
14% of the hires whose last job was commercial or Big Tech had earlier defense or military experience — 103 of 745. They did a tour at a prime or in uniform, left for commercial tech, and have now moved into defense tech. For a recruiter, that is a population the obvious searches miss: filtering for people currently at a defense employer would surface 14% of this cohort and skip the rest. We have no conversion or offer-acceptance data on these hires and no read on why any of them moved, so this is a statement about where they came from, not about how well they respond or what motivates them.
“Legacy primes don't feed defense tech” is too simple. Split them by what they actually do, and a real pattern shows up: the consulting and systems-engineering shops feed real talent; most of the hardware-platform primes barely move. L3Harris is the one hardware company that breaks the rule.
Booz Allen Hamilton and RTX/Raytheon each sent exactly 7 engineers into these nine companies this year. Booz Allen's engineering headcount is a fifth of RTX's (8,502 vs. 44,988) — so its engineers left for defense tech at more than 5x the rate. MITRE and The Aerospace Corporation, both federally funded research centers rather than typical contractors, show the same pattern even more sharply. Lockheed sent zero of 956; Boeing sent two.
California leads by a wide margin, but a real second cluster shows up around Washington, DC — the cleared-work corridor Big Tech doesn't have.
California carries the largest single share, but New York (68) and Washington, DC (65) are close behind — and DC sits right next to Virginia (32), the two together forming a cleared-work corridor you won't find in Big Tech. Beyond the US: Finland and Germany, driven by ICEYE and Helsing, are hubs a US-only map can't show.
Everything needed to check this page against its own data.
| Cohort ID | ARENA-I01-SW9-2026YTD |
| Cohort | 956 software hires at 9 companies; 955 full career histories |
| Hire window | 2026-01..2026-07 |
| Data as of | 2026-08 (hire records); 2026-08-10 (engineering-headcount denominators) |
| Taxonomy version | prior-employer v2.0 / artifact v1.1 / discipline v1.1 |
| Dataset hash | hires fcf0b46252be · career histories 3ecb89b0682f |
| Build hash | 1565186c844f |
| Reproducibility | 115 of 160 published figures across Issues 01 and 02 regenerate from the stored data; the rest are itemised in the ledger, with what changed and why |
| Revised | 2026-08-28 |
Scope: nine companies selected for 2026 software-hiring volume (Anduril, Palantir, SpaceX, Scale AI, Applied Intuition, Shield AI, ICEYE, Saronic, Helsing) — not company size, funding, or valuation. 956 genuine new external software hires, 2026 YTD. This is a claim about software hiring at these nine firms — not about all of defense tech, and not about hardware.
Feeder rate: 2026 hires per 10,000 LinkedIn-listed engineers, benchmarked against the 28 prior employers with a large enough named engineering department to size this way (276 of 956 hires). Every row carries its observed hire count and a 95% Poisson interval, because most rows rest on fewer than ten hires and their intervals overlap. It's a same-methodology comparison across companies we've actually looked up, not an index against the full labor market — treat it as a relative ranking among peers shown, not a universal 1.0 baseline.
Career lineage: immediate-prior employer vs. full work history are reported separately. “Defense background” = ever at a legacy prime, defense contractor, or in the military. Full-career results computed on 955 enriched profiles.
Data: Crustdata career-history signal, Aug 2026 (cached). LinkedIn lags real start dates by weeks, so recent months are undercounted. Classification is rule-based and imperfect at the margins.
The engineers these companies win are mostly still at Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta — and about a fifth of them already did a defense tour somewhere earlier in their careers. Finding them is exactly the search we run. Building your team, or open to the jump? Let's talk.