Costa Mesa, California, has more open robotics roles than the entire Bay Area combined right now. This is not a story about a burgeoning Southern California tech scene. This is one company. Anduril has 1,128 active postings in Costa Mesa. Everyone else in the city has zero.
If you strip Anduril out and look at the rest of the industry, the map is very different from what people assume. Below is what the catalog actually says about robotics geography.
The top hiring hubs
Every city with at least 20 active postings across 3 or more companies:
| Metro | Active roles | Distinct companies | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Costa Mesa, CA | 1,128 | 1 | Anduril |
| Austin, TX | 270 | 8 | Diversified (Apptronik, Saronic, Diligent, Cobot, more) |
| Mountain View, CA | 261 | 13 | Classic Bay: Nuro, Reliable, Kodiak, Wing |
| Washington, DC metro | 237 | 33 | Defense diversity |
| Dallas, TX | 217 | 6 | Rockwell + industrial |
| Foster City, CA | 187 | 1 | Zoox |
| Seattle | 102 | 10 | Amazon-adjacent robotics |
| San Francisco | 85 | 13 | AI-forward robotics + Physical Intelligence |
| San Diego | 68 | 9 | Shield AI + defense-tech |
| Boston / Waltham / Cambridge | 122 | 12 | Boston Dynamics + old-guard robotics |
| Pittsburgh | 48 | 6 | Aurora + CMU cohort |
| Sunnyvale | 67 | 6 | Wayve US HQ + others |
What surprised me
Austin has quietly become the second most diversified robotics city in the country after DC. Apptronik, Saronic, Cobot, Diligent, Standard Bots, and a handful of smaller shops are all hiring there right now. If you're a robotics engineer thinking about a move to a city with real optionality (multiple employers, not one dominant force), Austin is the top of the list right now. It might have been Pittsburgh a few years ago. Not anymore.
Washington DC has 237 roles across 33 companies. The company count is what matters. That's more distinct employers than any other US metro. If you want defense-adjacent robotics work, DC has more employers per open role than anywhere else.
The Bay Area doesn't stand out the way I expected. Combine Mountain View (261), San Francisco (85), San Mateo (77), San Carlos (62), Sunnyvale (67), and Foster City (187, all Zoox) and you get ~740 roles. That's a lot, but it's less than Costa Mesa alone. The Bay Area is still important. It's not dominant.
Pittsburgh has 48 postings. Aurora is the anchor. CMU is nearby. But the ecosystem has thinned considerably from the 2019-2022 peak. If you're relocating for robotics and Pittsburgh is on the list, know that Aurora is basically the employer.
Boston is holding steady around 122 postings across 12 companies. Boston Dynamics is the biggest, but the region has real depth. iRobot, Rethink alums, medical robotics, and a strong startup pipeline out of MIT.
What isn't there
Detroit is not a robotics hub in the catalog. Not zero, but negligible relative to what people assume for "automotive robotics." The Detroit-based auto OEMs (GM, Ford, Stellantis) do hire robotics engineers but most of the actual robotics R&D moved to the Bay Area, Austin, and Pittsburgh years ago.
Chicago and Minneapolis don't appear. Neither does Denver for pure robotics (Denver shows up strongly in space, not robotics).
Los Angeles proper is smaller than Costa Mesa (135 vs 1,128), but that's an Anduril effect again. Excluding Anduril, greater LA county is around 200 postings across a handful of companies.
The remote picture
Remote-friendly robotics postings are rarer than in general software. 70 postings tag "Remote" as the location. Most of those are actually hybrid roles at established teams (Wayve UK/US split, some Nvidia Isaac, Physical Intelligence).
The mental model: robotics still requires physical hardware access most of the time. Testing, integration, hardware bring-up, and simulator/real-robot loops all get harder when you're remote. The remote-friendly robotics roles are heavily concentrated in pure ML, simulation, and cloud infra.
Practical calls if you're considering a move
Three practical things:
Costa Mesa is worth serious consideration if Anduril is the employer you want. That's the whole equation for that city. If you don't want to work for Anduril specifically, don't move to Costa Mesa for robotics.
Austin is the best "optionality" city right now. Multiple employers, real cost-of-living advantage over the Bay Area, direct flights to most places. Diligent, Apptronik, Saronic, Cobot, and Standard Bots all give you a Plan B if your first offer doesn't work out.
The Bay Area is still the best place to be if you want the AI-forward end of robotics (Physical Intelligence, Nvidia, Wayve US, Nuro, Reliable) but the compression from housing costs is real. If you're a mid-career engineer, expect base-comp gains to be eaten by housing math.
Methodology
Numbers pulled from active job listings on GreatRobots.ai. City names come from the first comma-separated segment of each posting's location string. I filtered out cities with fewer than 20 active postings. The "distinct companies" column counts unique employers, which is why Costa Mesa reads as 1 even though it's 1,128 postings.
Browse the full company list to see who's in which city. The next geography update publishes in early Q3 when I run the equivalent Q2 snapshot.