Three days, three different top fives
League tables of employers are usually dull because they barely move. This one moved twice in 48 hours. Okta and Block have dropped out entirely; Databricks left on the 7th and returned on the 8th; and two names that were nowhere on the 6th are now second and fourth.
The direction is as interesting as the movement. Rippling went from 73 live roles to 114 in one day, and Anthropic from 72 to 98 — while Stripe, still the largest, fell from 174 to 123 across the same window. The biggest hirer in the aggregate is contracting while the fastest climbers are an AI lab and an HR platform.
| Employer | 6 Aug | 7 Aug | 8 Aug | Two-day change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe | 174 | 155 | 123 | −29% |
| Rippling | — | 73 | 114 | +56% in a day |
| Datadog | 130 | 91 | 102 | −22% |
| Anthropic | — | 72 | 98 | +36% in a day |
| Databricks | 85 | — | 91 | +7% |
| Okta | 82 | 70 | — | out of the top five |
| Block | 77 | — | — | out of the top five |
Why we will trend this, having refused to trend salaries
Yesterday this desk retired day-over-day salary comparisons, after publishing a British finding that reversed itself in twenty-four hours. It is fair to ask why employer counts get treated differently.
Because they are a different kind of number. An advertised median is computed over only the listings that disclose pay — a small, self-selected subsample, so a handful of new ads can swing it wildly. An employer's live count is a census: every listing we hold for that company, counted. Nothing is inferred and nothing is sampled. A census of hundreds moves when the world moves; a median of a dozen moves when the dozen changes. That is the whole distinction, and it is why one is publishable as a trend and the other is not.
The same shape, at global scale
What we are seeing in five rows is the local edge of something much larger. AI job postings finished 2025 running 134% above pre-pandemic levels while overall tech postings sat 34% below them. The share of tech postings naming at least one AI skill went from 15% in January 2024 to 73% in May 2026, and roles with AI in the title rose 173% year on year in the first quarter of 2026. Analysts have taken to calling it two parallel realities.
The two climbers fit that story precisely. Anthropic carried 1,095 active job postings in 2026, more than double the year before, and is among the most aggressive net hirers in the industry. Rippling has grown to roughly 5,000 staff from 3,600 in 2024, announced 150 new Dublin roles to build out its EMEA base and is doubling its India headcount toward 2,000. Neither is a surprise once you look up from the table.
The pool grew. The remote share did not.
The aggregate itself expanded: 3,864 open roles on the 6th, 4,139 today — up 7.1% in two days. Growth on that scale in that time is unusual and worth watching rather than explaining.
What grew alongside it is telling. The share of listings flagged remote-eligible fell from 15% to 12% while the pool added 275 roles. The arithmetic only works one way: the roles arriving are more office-bound than the roles already there. For a job seeker filtering on remote, the market got bigger and slightly worse at the same time.
| 6 Aug | 7 Aug | 8 Aug | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open roles | 3,864 | 3,927 | 4,139 |
| Remote-flagged | 15% | 15% | 12% |
| Job sources | 38 | 39 | 38 |
What to take from it
If you are searching: the fastest-growing employers in a market are rarely the most famous ones, and a league table two days old is already wrong. Watch the climbers, not the leader.
If you are hiring: you are competing for engineers against companies that added forty roles in a day. Speed of process is now part of your offer, whether or not you intended it to be.
Every market figure here is a page you can open. Start with the market by city and read your own.
Earlier editions
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- · 7 min readBritain lost 19,000 vacancies in a year. Firms with under ten staff lost 18,000 of them.UK vacancies fell 2.7% over the year to 707,000. At businesses with 1 to 9 employees they fell 16.1%, to 95,000 - six times the rate of the market as a whole. That band holds about an eighth of all vacancies and accounts for almost the entire annual decline. The headline is a small number sitting on top of a very uneven one.Read the analysis →
- · 7 min readChanging jobs still pays more. Two trackers cannot agree how much.For July 2026, ADP put the annual raise for people who changed jobs at 7.0% and for people who stayed at 4.4% - a gap of 2.6 points, the widest in a year. The Atlanta Fed, reading a different survey the same month, put changers at 4.4% and stayers at 3.6% - a gap of 0.8. Both are real. 4.4% is the mover's raise in one measure and the stayer's raise in the other.Read the analysis →