Verkada Debuts at 297 Roles as Security and Health Tech Buck a 44% Pullback
Verkada's 297-role debut and Sailor Health's 138-role psychology buildout pushed two non-AI, non-crypto categories to the top of weekly hiring -- a reminder that ClawJobs now spans well beyond its original sector mix.
Verkada Arrives at Full Scale
Physical security platform Verkada entered the dataset this week with 297 active roles, the largest single-company debut since ByteDance's 4,781-role entrance two weeks ago. Unlike most new entrants, Verkada arrived broad rather than narrow: 26 Solutions Engineering hires, 23 in Cameras hardware, 19 each in Field Marketing and Strategy Operations, plus a Director, Global Enterprise Accounts and a Senior Engineering Manager for the Clients Platform. The pattern reads as a full go-to-market and hardware build, not a backlog flush.
- --297 roles spanning Sales, Hardware Engineering, and International expansion
- --Joins Anduril (143 new, 1,778 active) in pushing AI Robotics and physical-systems hiring above pure-software cohorts
- --Security category steady at 546 roles even as overall postings fall 44.5%
Health Tech and Dev Tools Defy the Pullback
While the overall market dropped to 5,477 new postings from 9,875 last week, three categories ran the other direction. Health Tech jumped 188% to 274 roles, almost entirely on Sailor Health's 138-role debut in virtual geriatric psychology and Dandy's 59 roles. Dev Tools rose 137% to 135 roles led by Retool (39), Merge (25), and GitLab (16). Lending Surge: from 1 role last week to 5 (+400%) -- small base but a sector rebuilding after the April pullback.
- --Health Tech: 274 new roles, +188% WoW
- --Dev Tools: 135 new roles, +137% WoW
- --AI Security: 19 new roles across 6 companies (+137%), led by Lakera
Market Context
Total active jobs reached 44,667 across 601 hiring companies, with 5,477 new postings this week against the prior week's 9,875 -- a 44.5% pullback that mirrors the April 4 correction. Every department group contracted in absolute terms, with Product falling hardest (-62.3%) and Legal the most resilient (-7.6%). Remote stayed muted at 18.9% of new postings, well below the long-run share, as hardware-heavy hirers like Verkada, SpaceX (123 new), and Anduril push on-site work.
- --44,667 total active jobs across 601 companies
- --5,477 new postings, down 44.5% WoW
- --Tech (2,474), AI (1,503), and Crypto (1,422) lead by company-type share
ByteDance Settles In
Last week's ByteDance prediction of 'new-entrant volatility' resolved cleanly: ByteDance posted 836 new roles versus 4,047 the prior week, an 80% decline that brings it into normal-rhythm territory. The company remains the dataset's largest employer at 4,883 active roles, but the Operations-heavy mix (180 of 836 new postings) suggests the initial engineering and product backlog has cleared and ongoing hiring is now focused on running the business rather than building it.
Key Themes
Market Snapshot
Hiring Signals
Verkada Debuts at 297 Roles, Largest Security-Category Entrance
highVerkada appeared in the dataset for the first time with 297 active roles, all posted this week. The hiring is unusually balanced across Solutions Engineering, Cameras hardware, International expansion, and Enterprise Sales, suggesting a mature company being indexed in full rather than a startup scaling. A Director, Global Enterprise Accounts and a Senior Engineering Manager for the Clients Platform anchor the leadership layer.
Health Tech Surges 188% on Sailor Health and Dandy
highHealth Tech went from 95 new roles last week to 274 this week, almost entirely driven by two debuts: Sailor Health's 138 roles (116 Clinical, mostly Licensed Clinical Psychologists for virtual geriatric care) and Dandy's 59 roles in dental SaaS. The pattern points to virtual care expanding into underserved demographics, with Sailor also posting Founding Engineer and Founding PM roles in NYC.
Dev Tools Up 137% as Developer Platforms Restock
mediumDev Tools moved from 57 to 135 new postings, led by Retool's 39 roles, Merge's 25, and GitLab's 16. Unlike past Dev Tools cycles concentrated in observability or CI, this batch leans toward internal-tool builders and API integration platforms -- the layer that ships customer-facing automation rather than infra plumbing.
Legal Holds at -7.6% While Every Other Group Drops Double Digits
mediumLegal was the only department group to lose less than 10% week over week (-7.6% to 146 roles), while Engineering fell 41.3%, Product fell 62.3%, and Operations fell 50%. The resilience comes from sustained AML and compliance hiring at Bybit (Senior Compliance Audit Manager, AML Manager Turkey), Robinhood (Senior Crypto AML Investigator), and CoinDCX, plus a Regulatory Counsel at Waymo and a Product & Regulatory Counsel at Nova Credit.
Bybit Posts 61 Roles, Pushing Liquid Staking +40%
mediumBybit Staked SOL added 61 roles spanning a Senior Principal Backend Engineer (C++), Principal AI Engineer, Head of Organization Development, Data Analyst Director, and four Legal & Compliance hires. The breadth -- engineering, AI, people ops, and compliance in a single week -- looks like a coordinated post-restructuring scale-up at the Abu Dhabi and Kuala Lumpur hubs.
ByteDance Normalizes 80% After Two-Week Surge
highByteDance dropped from 4,047 new postings last week to 836 this week, the steepest single-company decline ever recorded in the dataset. The remaining mix is Operations-heavy (180 of 836), with R&D (88) and Backend (83) trailing -- consistent with normalized ongoing hiring after the initial 4,883-role indexing cleared. The April 24 hardware-debutant volatility pattern now repeats at company scale.
CEX Hiring Up 30.6% as OKX, Binance, CoinDCX All Add Roles
mediumCEX postings rose from 49 to 64 (+30.6%) with three exchanges contributing: OKX (19 roles, mostly Senior/Staff engineering in Hong Kong), Binance (18), and CoinDCX (12). The exchange-layer resilience contrasts with broader crypto hiring slack -- centralized venues continue to staff infrastructure and surveillance while DEX-side hiring sits at 26 across the category.
Company Spotlights
Verkada
Verkada's 297-role debut is the second-largest single-week entrance since ByteDance and the largest in the Security category to date. The mix is striking: Solutions Engineering, Channel, and Field Marketing dominate, with Cameras hardware and International expansion close behind, indicating a mature company indexed in full rather than a young startup scaling. For job seekers, this is an unusual moment -- 297 simultaneous openings across sales, hardware, and platform engineering means the bar for first-look interviews is temporarily wider than at most platform vendors of this size.
Sailor Health
Sailor Health debuted with 138 roles concentrated in virtual geriatric psychology -- 116 of the postings are Licensed Clinical Psychologist roles across state-by-state PSYPACT jurisdictions, with bilingual variants in Maryland, Texas, and Louisiana. Behind the clinical bulk sit two Founding Engineers (Senior/Staff), a Founding Product Manager in NYC, and a small Patient Growth team, marking the company as an early-stage clinical platform building a multistate provider network. The breadth of state licensure signals a regulated rollout strategy rather than a single-state pilot.
Bybit Staked SOL
Bybit added 61 roles in a single week -- the largest crypto-native push of the week -- with hires spanning Senior Principal Backend (C++), Principal AI Engineer, Data Analyst Director, Head of Organization Development, and four Legal & Compliance roles. The cross-functional spread looks less like one product launch and more like a coordinated regional rebuild around the Abu Dhabi and Kuala Lumpur tech hubs. Compliance depth (Senior Compliance Audit Manager, AML Manager Turkey) is consistent with the exchange operating in newly regulated jurisdictions.
Retool
Retool's 39-role debut anchors the Dev Tools surge and lands in a category that grew 137% week over week. The internal-tools platform appears to be staffing breadth rather than depth in a single function -- a useful signal for builders who want a generalist engineering culture rather than the deep-specialist tracks at AI infra companies. Combined with Merge (25) and GitLab (16), the Dev Tools cohort posted more roles than the entire Lending and Derivatives categories combined this week.
Anduril
Anduril posted 143 new roles against a 1,778-role active base, with Manufacturing leading (9), then Discovery Engineering (6) and Software Platform (6). Hardware Engineering's Electrical Lab and ArsenalOS Factory Systems each added 4 roles -- the factory-floor build continues alongside the ongoing software platform expansion. This is the steadiest large-employer signal in the dataset, contrasting with the volatility of single-week debutants like Verkada or Sailor Health.
Notable Roles
Founding Engineer at a Health Tech debutant that posted 138 roles in a single week -- one of two engineering hires that will design the technical platform behind a 116-psychologist virtual-care rollout. Rare combination of clinical scale and founding-stage technical influence.
Founding PM at Sailor Health based in NYC's Soho office. Coupled with the Founding Engineer roles, marks a deliberate technical-and-product origin team behind what is now the third-largest single-company debut of the year.
CRO listing at a top-10 chain ($2.4B TVL), remote-US. A C-suite revenue hire at this stage signals a shift from infrastructure expansion toward go-to-market discipline -- atypical for an L2/chain hiring profile.
CISO at a mid-size exchange based in Madrid. CISO hires at CEXs typically precede regulatory licensing milestones in the host country -- worth watching alongside CEX.IO's Madrid operational base.
Principal AI Engineer at a crypto exchange's Central-Hub team in Kuala Lumpur -- the first Principal-level AI hire from a tier-one CEX captured this year. Reads as exchange-side AI integration moving from research to production.
Robinhood's Director of Operations for the Crypto vertical. Onshore (Menlo Park / NYC) leadership build for the crypto product line follows Robinhood's 27-role active footprint and signals a deeper operational commitment beyond brokerage trading.
Block (Square parent) opening Head of US Public Policy alongside a Global Head of Sanctions in the same week. The combination is a regulatory-readiness signal, consistent with the broader Legal-resilient theme.
Director-level GTM hire inside Verkada's 297-role debut wave. Anchors the enterprise sales motion that the rest of the 26-person Solutions Engineering and 18-person Channel hires support.
VP of Product at a Derivatives protocol in a week where the Derivatives category contracted 21%. Hiring a product leader against the sector tide is the kind of contrarian build that flags conviction independent of market sentiment.
Head of YouTube at a Fintech is unusual -- a dedicated creator-platform marketing lead suggests Slash is committing to long-form video as a primary growth channel rather than treating it as a side asset.
Department Breakdown
Every department group shrank in absolute terms this week, but Legal stood out as nearly flat at -7.6% while Product collapsed -62.3%. Engineering remains the largest group at 1,632 new postings but contracted in line with the market.
Category Breakdown
Most categories pulled back with the market, but Health Tech (+188%), Dev Tools (+137%), AI Security (+137%), Lending (+400% off a small base), and AI Fintech (+83%) ran against the tide. Hardware, AI Lab, and Infrastructure fell more than 50% as the April debutants normalize.
Geographic Distribution
Beijing (333) edged past San Francisco (304) as the top single city this week, with Shanghai (234) and London (140) rounding out the international leaders. Only 18.9% of new postings were remote, well below the long-run share, as hardware-heavy hirers like Verkada, SpaceX, and Anduril dominate the on-site count.
Top Locations (New Roles)
Remote Stats
Skills by Department
TradFi Bridge Report
TradFi crypto hiring stayed at a slow, consistent cadence this week: 5 institutions posted 23 new crypto-tagged roles between them, led by Morgan Stanley (8) and Mastercard (7). The cohort has now held this rhythm for five consecutive weeks -- well below crypto-native exchange volume, but unusually steady against an overall market that fell 44.5%.
Morgan Stanley
tradfiMorgan Stanley posted the largest TradFi crypto batch this week (8 new vs 39 active). Continues the steady-cadence pattern flagged in April and is now the second-most-active TradFi crypto hirer after JPMorgan.
Mastercard
tradfiMastercard's 47 active crypto-tagged roles makes it the largest TradFi crypto footprint in the dataset. Sustained week-over-week additions point to ongoing payment-rails work rather than a one-off team build.
JPMorgan Chase
tradfiJPMorgan's Kinexys momentum from April continues -- 4 new this week against a 59-role active base, the most of any TradFi institution. Slower pace, but the steadiest TradFi hire.
Robinhood
fintechRobinhood's Director of Operations for Crypto leads a 3-role week, alongside a Senior Crypto AML Investigator. Onshore leadership and compliance build out the crypto vertical alongside the existing brokerage operation.
Stripe
fintechStripe added a single crypto role this week, keeping its 19-role footprint steady. The lightest TradFi week for Stripe in over a month.
Market Outlook
This week's 44.5% pullback looks more like normalization after the ByteDance-driven April surge than a structural shift. The signal worth tracking is which categories ran against the pullback: Health Tech, Dev Tools, AI Security, CEX, and Liquid Staking each grew while everything else softened. If the new-entrant volatility pattern holds, expect Verkada and Sailor Health to normalize sharply over the next two weeks, while the categories that grew organically (CEX, Liquid Staking, AI Security) should keep adding incrementally. The Legal department's resilience -- nearly flat against a -44.5% backdrop -- is the most durable signal: AML, Compliance, and Regulatory Counsel roles look like the safest harbor for job seekers if the broader pullback extends into May.
Areas to Watch
Verkada and Sailor Health Normalization
highBoth companies' debuts (297 and 138 roles) follow the same pattern as Nebius, Hadrian, and ByteDance in earlier weeks -- a heavy initial batch followed by a sharp tail-off. Expect both to drop 70-90% next week as the indexing backlog clears.
Confirms the 'new-entrant volatility' pattern flagged in the 2026-04-24 and 2026-05-01 newsletters. ByteDance fell 79.4% this week; Rocket Lab fell 90%; Mistral AI fell 97.7%. The pattern is now a four-week trend.
Compliance and AML as a Defensive Track
highLegal was the only department to stay near flat (-7.6%) while every other group fell 20%+. AML appears in 140 Legal job descriptions this week. The combination of regulatory pressure at exchanges (Bybit, Robinhood, CoinDCX) and Block's dual Public Policy + Sanctions hires suggests Compliance is becoming the cycle-resistant track in this market.
CEX Infrastructure Resilience
mediumCEX hiring grew 30.6% in a -44.5% week, with OKX, Binance, and CoinDCX all adding roles. CEX.IO posted two CISO listings. Centralized venues are continuing to staff infrastructure and surveillance independent of broader market sentiment, consistent with the pattern from the 2026-04-04 newsletter.
The 'CEX stable while market contracts' theme from 2026-04-04 continues to hold. CEX category has now grown in three of the last six weeks while overall market has been negative in four of those six.
Health Tech Beyond AI
mediumHealth Tech (non-AI) grew 188% on Sailor Health and Dandy, both non-AI plays in virtual care and dental SaaS. The category had been overshadowed by AI Health in prior weeks; this is the first time non-AI Health Tech outpaced AI Health (84 roles) by absolute count in a single week.
Dev Tools Restock Cycle
lowRetool (39), Merge (25), and GitLab (16) drove a 137% category jump. If this is a coordinated restock rather than three independent debuts, expect more developer-platform vendors (Vercel, Linear, Sentry) to appear in the next 2-3 weeks. Worth watching for breadth before calling a trend.