The Bay Area Index.
A weekly read on whether Bay Area startups are hiring harder or pulling back. It works like the PMI: 50 means steady, above 50 the market is heating up, below 50 it's cooling. Every reading is built from the real open roles at roughly 2,500 companies backed by top VCs, not from surveys or self-reported numbers.
50
Baseline
A diffusion index: 50 = steady, above = heating, below = cooling. 2 of 4 signals live.
Baseline set Jul 2, 2026 · moves with next Monday's scrape
Open roles
17,239
live · Bay Area
Companies hiring
1,864
≥1 open role
Posted · 30d
4,665
new postings
AI / ML roles
1,091
6% of all roles
Signal 1 · Hiring
Hiring Heat
Score
50/ 100
1,864 of the 2,542 companies we track (73%) have at least one open Bay Area role right now. Of the roles with a seniority on file, 30% are entry-to-mid level, a decent tell for whether teams are backfilling or actually growing. The score reads 50, the baseline, until next week's scrape gives it change to measure.
Context · open roles by seniority
The score · how it's built
50 = no change vs last week · left of tick = cooling · right = heating
Posting flow
45% of scoreCounts every posting that appeared or was retired this week. When more than half of all that movement is roles opening, companies are adding jobs faster than jobs are going away, so the market is heating.
Open roles
30% of scoreCompares the total number of live openings with last week's. A growing pile of unfilled roles means demand for people is outrunning hiring; a shrinking one means the opposite.
Hiring breadth
25% of scoreCounts how many different companies have at least one opening. When breadth rises, hiring is spreading across the ecosystem rather than a few big names doing all of it.
Signal 2 · Capital
Capital & Formation
Score
50/ 100
58% of hiring companies are still early (pre-seed through Series B), set against the growth and late-stage names that otherwise dominate headcount. The median posted salary across open roles is $187k, one more read on how much competition there is for talent right now. The score reads 50, the baseline, until week-over-week movement exists to measure.
Context · hiring companies by stage
The score · how it's built
50 = no change vs last week · left of tick = cooling · right = heating
Posted pay
55% of scoreTracks the middle salary companies advertise on their postings. When offers rise week over week, companies are bidding harder for the same people, a live read on how much capital is chasing talent.
Early-stage share
45% of scoreMeasures the slice of all open roles that belongs to young companies (pre-seed through Series B). When that slice grows, the newest generation of startups is doing more of the hiring, a healthy sign for company formation.
Pay
What the top five functions pay
Tick = median, band = middle 50% of posted base-pay ranges (annualized USD). 80% of open roles disclose pay.
Engineering
6,052 roles
Sales
2,308 roles
Data & ML
1,988 roles
Marketing
1,011 roles
Product
780 roles
Scale
Open roles · by company size
Flexibility
Open roles · by work mode
Demand
Who's hiring the most
Signal 3 · Sentiment
Market Sentiment
Soon this pulls tone from a handful of Bay Area and startup press outlets: a second, independent read on the mood, updated alongside the hiring data. Building the scraper for it next.
Signal 4 · Builders
GitHub Momentum
Coming soon: what Bay Area engineers ship in public, from commit velocity across local startups' open source to fresh repos and which AI tools are actually getting adopted. The build-side counterpart to the hiring numbers.
How it's built
The formula, honestly
Everything on this page comes from a scraper I run weekly across 15 top-VC portfolio job boards, the same data that powers the jobs and companies pages. No survey data, no self-reported numbers.
The number up top is a diffusion index, the same construction as the PMI: 50 means steady state (postings opening at the pace they close, breadth and pay flat on the week), and above 50 the market is heating, below it's cooling. Hiring Heat reads the flow of postings (openings as a share of the week's turnover: closings plus six-month expirations) plus week-over-week change in open roles and in companies hiring. Capital & Formation reads the weekly movement in median posted salary and in the early-stage share of open roles. The two blend 60/40 into the composite; sentiment and GitHub momentum re-split the weights when they come online.
Caveats, honestly: the zero point (50 = no change) is objective, but the gain, how big a weekly swing pins the gauge, is a judgment call until enough history accumulates to calibrate it. There's still no funding-dollar data here, so "capital" reads company formation through hiring, not round sizes. And postings older than six months count as expired and are excluded from every number on this page. A role "open" since 2015 isn't hiring, it's a forgotten tab.