Usually, the motto "If you build it, they will come" works when it comes to attracting talent, or, in the case of Kevin Costner, baseball players. But when it comes to engineering talent for the world's biggest — and most competitive — technology companies, sometimes you need to come to the talent.

It appears that a battle for top engineering talent in Seattle is upon us, and it involves three of the tech industry's most powerful giants.

Apple job listings in Seattle are up 155% since January 1, with a particular focus on recruiting engineering talent.

That appears the be the case for Apple ($AAPL), which has been in a hiring spree for engineering talent in Seattle. It's a particularly interesting swell of activity, given the fact that Seattle is home to scores engineering talent at both Amazon ($AMZN) and Microsoft ($MSFT). The positions Apple is hiring for in Seattle points to a plausible desire by Apple to poach some of that talent.

Apple has listed 184 unique job titles since January 1, with "iCloud Software Engineer" being the most-common listing, appearing at least 423 times. "Applied Research Scientist - Machine Learning" was second-most common, with 379 listings.

Title

Openings - all of 2019

iCloud Software Engineer

423

Applied Research Scientist - Machine Learning

379

Senior Machine Learning - Research Scientist

361

GIS Technician

338

Applied Research Scientist - CVML

332

Siri - Software Engineer

329

Machine Learning Engineer

327

Software Engineer

288

Siri - Senior Software Engineer, Sports

263

Software Engineer - AI/ML

230

In fact, the top-10 most-common job listings for Apple in Seattle were all engineering, machine learning, or technician openings.

As of this week, hiring activity appears to still be on a growth path, with 87 individual job listings recorded in Seattle on October 31, 2019.

Title

Openings (November 5, 2019)

GIS Technician

7

Siri - Software Engineer

4

Research Scientist - Computer Vision and Machine Learning

3

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Cloud Services

3

AI/ML - Full Stack Software Engineer

2

Applied Machine Learning Researcher

2

Applied Scientist - Sensors - AI/ML

2

ML Engineer - Siri Knowledge Graph

2

Siri - Senior Software Development Engineer in Test

2

iOS Developer - Apple Health

2

The most common listing this week is for a "GIS Technician" who will work on Apple Maps products, followed by an ongoing need for Siri Software Engineers and Research Scientists with a focus on "Computer Vision and Machine Learning".  

About the Data:

Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales. 

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