Every open role at 75 defense and national security companies, pulled straight from the applicant tracking systems behind jobs.arena.vet. These 75 are a slice of the sector, not a census of it, and everything below describes them rather than defense tech as a whole. Read all at once, their boards answer three questions that are easy to get wrong from the outside: how long a job actually stays open, what kind of work is really being posted, and how many of these roles are open to people with no security clearance.
On these boards a job posting is a perishable good. A role more than two months old is usually one this employer could not fill, not one nobody noticed.
Of every 100 roles posted in a given week, this is how many are still open later. Because our board only shows live roles, a posting that disappears has either been filled or pulled. Weekly cohorts, smoothed across three weeks, indexed to the fresh baseline of 473 roles per week.
SOURCE / METHOD — Cohort survival estimated from a single snapshot, which assumes a roughly steady posting rate. Verified against 12 months of weekly headcount data for the same companies. 75 defense tech companies tracked on jobs.arena.vet, 6,724 open roles, snapshot 10 September 2026. These 75 employers only, not a sector wide sample.
Among these companies software is the slowest moving category, not the hottest. The roles that clear fastest are the ones nobody writes threads about: quality, finance, and business development.
Median age of the roles currently open in each function. Lower means the category turns over faster.
| Function | Open roles | Median age |
|---|---|---|
| Safety, Quality & Reliability | 240 | 43 days |
| Finance, Legal & People | 337 | 45 days |
| Go to Market & BD | 385 | 51 days |
| Program & Product | 315 | 52 days |
| Manufacturing & Production | 700 | 55 days |
| Test & Integration | 287 | 63 days |
| Mechanical, Aero & Controls | 790 | 72 days |
| Hardware & Electrical | 488 | 74 days |
| Systems Engineering | 201 | 78 days |
| Software & AI | 1,481 | 79 days |
| Mission & Field Ops | 350 | 86 days |
• A long median cuts two ways: the role is either hard to fill or effectively evergreen. Both mean the same thing for a candidate, which is that applying late is not the disadvantage it is in a fast clearing category.
SOURCE / METHOD — 75 defense tech companies tracked on jobs.arena.vet, 6,724 open roles, snapshot 10 September 2026. These 75 employers only, not a sector wide sample.
Four out of five new roles at these 75 companies are not software. Their hiring is dominated by people who build, test, qualify and ship physical hardware.
Share of the 2,043 roles these companies posted in the last 30 days, by function.
SOURCE / METHOD — 75 defense tech companies tracked on jobs.arena.vet, 6,724 open roles, snapshot 10 September 2026. These 75 employers only, not a sector wide sample.
At these 75 employers the clearance wall is lower than it looks from outside. Most new roles do not name one, and the roles where the company will sponsor you move fastest of anything on their boards.
Clearance requirement named in the 2,043 roles these companies posted in the last 30 days, against their standing board for comparison.
| Requirement | New roles | Share of new | Share of board | Median age |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| None named | 1,193 | 58.4% | 59.9% | 71 days |
| Clearable, company sponsors | 356 | 17.4% | 14.4% | 49 days |
| Secret | 237 | 11.6% | 11.1% | 62 days |
| Top Secret | 182 | 8.9% | 10.4% | 77 days |
| TS/SCI | 75 | 3.7% | 4.3% | 71 days |
SOURCE / METHOD — 75 defense tech companies tracked on jobs.arena.vet, 6,724 open roles, snapshot 10 September 2026. These 75 employers only, not a sector wide sample.
Two things temper all of the above: this set of employers is far more concentrated than a headline count suggests, and it is not built for people at the start of their careers.
The top five companies are 46.9% of everything posted in the last 30 days. Any sector wide average is really a statement about a handful of employers.
Early career roles and internships together are 7.3% of these new postings. These companies are mostly hiring people who have already done the job somewhere else.
• One genuinely good habit among this group: 68.7% of their new roles publish a salary range.
SOURCE / METHOD — 75 defense tech companies tracked on jobs.arena.vet, 6,724 open roles, snapshot 10 September 2026. These 75 employers only, not a sector wide sample.
Scope, and what this is not. These 75 companies are the ones we track on jobs.arena.vet. They are not a random or representative sample of defense tech, they skew toward venture backed companies that publish an ATS feed, and they exclude the primes, most subcontractors, and every company whose roles never reach a public board. Every finding here describes these 75 employers in this window. None of it should be read as a measurement of the sector as a whole.
Source. Every role is pulled directly from the company's own applicant tracking system, not from an aggregator. Snapshot taken 10 September 2026: 6,724 roles across 75 companies after exclusions.
Exclusions. Two companies were removed. Every one of their roles carried a posted date inside the last 30 days across only seven and one distinct dates respectively, which is the signature of a newly connected board where the collection date was stamped onto historical postings rather than genuine hiring activity.
The survivorship caveat. Our board shows live roles only, so a filled role becomes invisible. That is precisely what makes the seven week finding measurable, but it also means counts of older postings understate what was really posted then. We publish rates for the 30 day window only, and use longer windows for rankings, where the bias affects every company roughly equally.
What would change our mind. The survival curve is estimated from one snapshot and assumes a roughly steady posting rate. Our next step is to archive a daily snapshot of the board, which will let us measure fill velocity per company and per role type directly rather than inferring it from one moment in time. If those direct measurements disagree with this curve, we will publish the correction.
We track every open role at 75 defense and national security companies because it is the same data we use to run searches. If you are hiring against a seven week clock, or trying to get into the sector without a clearance, that is the conversation we have every day.
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” — Theodore Roosevelt
Defense Tech Hiring Pulse · Issue 04
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