The weirdest thing I've seen in the catalog this quarter isn't Anduril's headcount growth. It's Rockwell.
Rockwell Automation is the number two hirer in robotics right now. Rockwell. The Milwaukee industrial automation legacy company that most engineers dismiss as a boring PLC shop. They posted 358 new robotics-adjacent roles in the last 30 days. That's more than every autonomy startup in the Bay Area combined, and it's a step-function jump from 118 in the previous month.
Anduril is still number one, and it isn't close. They went from 416 new roles the month before to 812 the following month. I don't know how an org onboards at that pace, but the ATS feed doesn't lie. Below is the full picture from a snapshot I ran on May 30, plus some notes on what actually moved and what didn't.
The setup
I run the catalog behind Great Robots, which tracks 209 robotics employers by pulling their ATS listings directly (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday). Right now there are about 5,400 unique openings across those companies. Of those, 1,819 were posted in the last 30 days.
A methodology note before the tables: ATS providers issue a separate requisition ID every time a role is posted in a new city. "Senior Software Engineer" listed in Costa Mesa, Austin, and Denver shows up as three ATS rows. All numbers below deduplicate by (company, title, city) so each unique role in each city counts once, not once per requisition ID. If you were doing this comparison in raw ATS terms, the numbers would run 15-40% higher for the biggest companies.
I don't have historical snapshots going back years. What I do have is posted_at on every row, which lets me compare "postings created in the last 30 days" against "postings created in the 30 days before that." Not a perfect proxy for headcount growth, but a good one for hiring velocity.
The following numbers all reflect a snapshot taken May 30, 2026. Every company below has enough active listings for the sample to mean something.
Fastest growing hiring pulses
Top 15 companies by 30-day posting delta (companies with at least 5 new postings in the current window):
| Company | Stage | HQ | Prev 30d | This 30d | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anduril Industries | Series G | Costa Mesa | 416 | 812 | +396 |
| Rockwell Automation | Public | Milwaukee | 118 | 358 | +240 |
| NVIDIA | Public | Santa Clara | 108 | 134 | +26 |
| 1X Technologies | Series B | Moss (Norway) | 0 | 65 | +65 |
| SHIELD AI | Series F | San Diego | 100 | 121 | +21 |
| Agility Robotics | Series B | Salem, OR | 12 | 28 | +16 |
| Voyager Technologies | Public | Denver | 15 | 37 | +22 |
| Reliable Robotics | Series C | Mountain View | 7 | 20 | +13 |
| Boston Dynamics | Acquired | Waltham | 32 | 43 | +11 |
| Zoox | Acquired by Amazon | Foster City | 49 | 58 | +9 |
| Kodiak Robotics | Series B | Mountain View | 14 | 25 | +11 |
| Standard Bots | Series A | Glen Cove, NY | 2 | 12 | +10 |
| Vannevar Labs | Series B | Palo Alto | 2 | 10 | +8 |
| Wing | Alphabet subsidiary | Palo Alto | 7 | 12 | +5 |
| Physical Intelligence | Series A | San Francisco | 2 | 7 | +5 |
Read these numbers carefully. The Anduril line is the story of the quarter. They went from 416 new postings the prior 30-day window to 812 the current one. That is not a normal expansion. That's an "we just closed our Series G, we have a defense contract cycle to run, and we're eating the labor market" number.
Rockwell Automation adding 240 net postings in 30 days is a story I honestly didn't expect. The traditional industrial automation giant is hiring more aggressively than most of the humanoid-and-autonomy startups combined. Manufacturing execution systems, PLC engineering, factory robotics integration. If you're at a bigger company already and considering the industrial side of robotics, don't sleep on Rockwell.
1X Technologies going from 0 to 65 postings is a step function. Their Norway HQ shows in the data, but the roles are heavily US-focused. 65 new robotics openings in a single month for a Series B humanoid company is aggressive. Watch this space for a raise announcement.
Who's slowing down
The companies with negative deltas month-over-month tell their own story:
- Wayve went from 47 to 27 (-20). They just hired a lot of AV product leadership in Q1; the pace is normalizing.
- Saronic went from 54 to 38 (-16). The autonomous maritime defense company still has 269 active roles overall — the -16 is not a slowdown so much as a leveling off.
- Aurora Innovation went from 41 to 28 (-13). Public autonomous trucking, working through headcount plan for the year.
- Apptronik went from 36 to 28 (-8). Growth stage humanoid, still hiring hard but a step off the peak.
Negative delta at any given month doesn't mean "in trouble." It usually means "a hiring wave already happened." Companies rarely stay on their peak hiring rate for two months in a row.
What roles are hot
Across the whole robotics catalog, by category, last 30 days:
| Category | 30d postings | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware | 667 | 26% |
| Autonomy | 462 | 18% |
| Simulation | 374 | 14% |
| Testing | 348 | 13% |
| AI/ML | 200 | 8% |
| Robotics general | 196 | 8% |
| Software | 153 | 6% |
| Controls | 104 | 4% |
| Computer vision | 60 | 2% |
| Research | 24 | 1% |
Hardware is the biggest hiring category by a wide margin. This is not the "software eats hardware" story. Robotics engineering is a hardware-heavy discipline, and the companies growing fastest right now are all shipping physical products. Mechanical engineers, EEs, firmware engineers, PCB layout specialists. That's where the volume is.
The AI/ML share is smaller than most people would guess (8%). This surprises non-industry readers. AI/ML shows up as its own category only when the posting is explicitly for an AI/ML researcher or engineer working on core model development. Perception work usually lands in Computer Vision. Behavior work usually lands in Autonomy. Simulation work has its own bucket. If you rolled all the ML-adjacent roles together you'd land closer to 40% of the catalog, which matches the reality of "robotics = ML now" more accurately.
Testing at 13% (348 postings in 30 days) is worth flagging. Every serious robotics company runs a big test-and-validation org now. If you're a QA-adjacent engineer looking at the industry, you're a much rarer commodity than you probably realize.
The geographic distribution
Where the top-hiring companies are actually headquartered:
- Costa Mesa, CA: Anduril (812 in 30d)
- Milwaukee-ish, WI / global: Rockwell (358)
- Santa Clara, CA: NVIDIA robotics roles (134)
- San Diego: SHIELD AI (121)
- Foster City / Bay Area: Zoox (58)
- Waltham, MA: Boston Dynamics (43)
- Salem, OR: Agility Robotics (28)
- Austin: Apptronik (28), Saronic (38)
- Mountain View: Nuro (26), Reliable Robotics (20), Kodiak (25)
- Pittsburgh: Aurora Innovation (28)
- Denver: Voyager Technologies (37)
The story on geography: the Bay Area is still the biggest robotics hiring hub, but Austin, Denver, and Southern California are catching up. Costa Mesa specifically is now a huge hiring engine thanks to Anduril. If you're geographically mobile and looking at robotics, don't rule out Salem, Austin, or Costa Mesa the way you might have three years ago.
What to take away from this
Three practical calls if you're in the market.
Anduril is the biggest employer in the space and will be for the rest of this year. If you're actively looking, they should be on your list, but understand the volume: about 1,493 active roles across the company after collapsing duplicate city postings. Application quality is a stronger signal there than at a smaller company where a good resume will get read no matter what.
Rockwell is an underrated option that engineers coming out of the AI/humanoid cohort routinely dismiss. Industrial robotics pays market rate (medians in the $150-165K range for senior IC), the roles are stable, and the domain overlap with modern robotics is much larger than it was ten years ago.
The humanoid cohort (1X, Agility, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics) is still hiring hard but at different velocities. 1X's 0 to 65 jump reads like a fundraise announcement is coming. Boston Dynamics is a modest but consistent hirer. Apptronik is still hot but cooling off the Q1 peak.
Methodology
Numbers are pulled from active job listings on GreatRobots.ai as of May 30, 2026. Every listing comes directly from the employer's ATS. All counts deduplicate by (company, title, city) so a role posted in three cities counts as three roles rather than as three-times-a-copy per city. If the same title-and-city combination appears with multiple ATS req IDs (usually a sync artifact), we collapse those into one. "Posted in the last 30 days" reflects when the row appeared in the ATS feed. "Delta" is the current-30d count minus the prev-30d count. I filtered out companies with fewer than 5 postings in the current window since small samples produce noise.
Companies below the 5-posting cutoff still show up in the catalog. Browse the full company list sorted by hiring velocity.
Next index publishes in early Q3. If you want a specific slice for the next version (defense-only, humanoid-only, by city, by category), reply on Twitter or email.