Frontier Hiring Pulse #2: A flat board, 170 quiet exits, and the categories that actually moved

Every figure below is computed from superintelligence.jobs /api/careers and reproducible with the script in our public repo. Snapshot: 2026-10-30T17:40 UTC, 2,428 open roles across 48 organizations — the same index as Pulse #1 one day earlier (2,430 roles).

1. A flat board is not a still board

Net change across the whole index in 24 hours: −2 roles. Boring — until you look under it. In the seven days before this snapshot, 168 roles appeared for the first time. For the board to end flat while 168 roles arrived, roughly 170 roles closed, were filled, or disappeared. The open board is a treadmill: about 7% of everything on it turns over every week, and the headline number is the rounding error at the end of that churn.

Two consecutive snapshots now report exactly 168 first-seen roles. The seven-day windows overlap by six days, so near-identical counts are expected — the exact match is a coincidence, not a law. But it establishes the thing that matters: weekly velocity at these 48 organizations is running near 170 requisitions, and one day of data tells you almost nothing. Candidates who check "has anything opened at Anthropic this week" are asking the right question; "has anything changed this month" is not answerable from a static board at all.

2. Research is up, infrastructure is down — the board tilts

The only meaningful category moves since Issue #1:

Category	Oct 29	Oct 30	Δ
Research	208	213	+5
Safety & Policy	221	223	+2
Product & Design	121	122	+1
People & Business Ops	254	254	0
Go-to-market	434	433	−1
Engineering	821	819	−2
Infrastructure	371	364	−7

Single-day deltas on a 2,400-role board are close to noise individually — but the shape is consistent: the two categories that shrink are the ones tied to physical buildout (infrastructure) and commercial expansion (go-to-market), while research and safety add roles. If this repeats over the coming weeks — and the daily snapshot record will tell us — the frontier labor market is re-weighting toward model work and away from the compute land-rush that drove 2025's hiring. We will not over-claim one day of movement; we will report week three honestly when it lands.

3. The top of the market holds; Anthropic dips

OpenAI 788 → 791 (+3), Anthropic 574 → 569 (−5). Anthropic's dip is −0.9% — noise by any serious standard, and inside the churn rate. What isn't noise is the concentration: the top two labs still hold 56% of every tracked opening, and the top three hold 58%. One lab's −5 roles is not a signal; the structural fact that nothing else has room to grow into is the signal.

4. Comp bands barely moved; disclosure did

Median posted bands among the 900 listings that publish one (37.1%, up from 36.7%):

Category	n	Oct 29 band	Oct 30 band
Research	82	$266K – $425K	$266K – $424K
Safety & Policy	88	$260K – $385K	$252K – $383K
Infrastructure	146	$230K – $378K	$230K – $382K
Engineering	313	$235K – $342K	$235K – $335K
Product & Design	57	$230K – $310K	$227K – $310K
Go-to-market	125	$221K – $276K	$221K – $275K
People & Business Ops	89	$216K – $256K	$216K – $250K

Daily band drift of a few thousand dollars at the edges is mostly composition (a handful of roles closing), not salary deflation — we flag it only because Issue #1 promised the drift series, and the honest version is: the dollar figures are stable to within noise day-over-day; don't let a headline "AI salaries are falling" survive contact with one day of it.

The real transparency story: 1X went from disclosing a pay band on 100% of openings in Issue #1 to 74% today — 26 points of disclosure removed in one snapshot cycle. OpenAI (78%) and Cohere (68%) held roughly steady; Anthropic, Mistral, Cerebras and Tenstorrent still publish nothing parseable. Transparency is not a ratchet — it can move backwards faster than any median ever moves.

5. Safety-hiring watch

Anthropic 81 → 79 safety & policy roles, OpenAI 58 → 62 (+4, the largest single-org move in the category this cycle). Wayve holds at 33. Safety sits at 9.2% of the board (223 of 2,428) — its share is becoming structural.

6. Remote, still a rounding error

143 of 2,428 roles (5.9%) are remote. Hybrid 845, on-site 791, unspecified 649. Cohere remains the one genuine outlier at 79 of 120 roles remote (65.8%) — if your constraint is geographic, nothing about Issue #1's advice has changed: optimize for Cohere-shaped exceptions, not for the trend.

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Methodology

Computed from the /api/careers snapshots of 2026-10-29T17:40 and 2026-10-30T17:40 UTC: roles with status = "open" and publiclyListed = true, deduplicated by requisition id; "new" by firstSeenAt. Every figure reproduces via scripts/pulse-stats.mjs in our public repo — run it against any snapshot and get the same numbers. Compensation medians parse employer-supplied band text; equity excluded. Both snapshots were produced by the index's daily 04:40 Australia/Sydney refresh.

Reuse: all figures are free to cite with attribution to superintelligence.jobs and a link to this page. Agents: GET /api/careers, MCP at /mcp, integration contract at skill.md.

Next issue: the churn series goes weekly — which categories close fastest, which roles never get refilled, and whether the research-up / infra-down tilt survives contact with week three.