San Francisco Bay Area · Tech, AI and beyond
Careerscape is a national recruiting and staffing agency. Our recruiters specialize by industry and work remotely for employers and job seekers in San Francisco, the Peninsula, the South Bay and the East Bay. Here is who is hiring, what roles pay and the state and city hiring rules that apply here.
San Francisco's office towers are filling again, and AI companies are the main reason. CBRE put city office vacancy at about 29.7% in the second quarter of 2026, down from 34.7% a year earlier. CoStar says AI firms signed more than half of new San Francisco office leases that quarter.
The jobs picture is narrower. Generative-AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, both headquartered in the city, averaged 410 San Francisco job listings a month in 2025, up from 85 in 2023, according to Lightcast data compiled by the city's chief economist and reported by the San Francisco Examiner. Yet all tech listings averaged 2,295 a month, against at least 3,875 in every year from 2019 to 2022. And tech employers filed layoff notices for more than 14,500 Bay Area workers in the 12 months ending June 2026, almost double the year before, per a Bloomberg analysis of California data.
So the Bay Area has two tech markets at once: a large pool of experienced engineers, product managers and sellers coming out of layoffs, and AI companies competing for people with hands-on model, infrastructure and applied-AI experience. Outside tech, healthcare and education are still adding jobs.
Careerscape recruits for Bay Area employers remotely, from a national team organized by industry. We run direct hire, contract, contract-to-hire, temporary and executive searches, plus RPO and MSP/VMS programs. Hiring? Request talent. Looking? Browse open jobs or send your resume.
By the numbers
BLS figures for the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro: San Francisco, San Mateo, Marin, Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Total payrolls were about 2.42 million jobs in September 2026, up 0.3% in a year. Recent months are preliminary and not seasonally adjusted.
AI job titles decoded
AI postings use titles that federal wage data doesn't track. Here is what the common ones usually mean, and what transfers into them.
Builds, trains and ships models inside products. It is mostly software engineering, with data pipelines and statistics on top. BLS has no separate category; these jobs usually count as software developers or data scientists.
Develops new model architectures, training methods and evaluations. Postings often ask for a PhD or published research. The closest BLS category is computer and information research scientists.
Works with customers to put models into their workflows: retrieval, integrations, prompts and testing. Part engineer, part consultant, so communication matters in the interview as much as code.
Runs the GPU clusters, networking, storage and training pipelines that models depend on. Distributed-systems, SRE and high-performance computing backgrounds transfer directly.
Test model behavior, build evaluation sets, red-team for misuse and manage training data. Some of these roles hire domain experts, such as lawyers, clinicians or accountants, rather than engineers.
Sales, solutions engineering, customer success and partnerships. Experienced SaaS sellers and sales engineers move over most easily when they can explain the product at a technical level.
Pay benchmarks
Median annual wages in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro, from BLS's May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics as published on O*NET OnLine.
| Role | Median annual pay | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Software developers | $186,640 | BLS OEWS via O*NET OnLine (U.S. DOL), May 2025 |
| Registered nurses | $186,610 | BLS OEWS via O*NET OnLine (U.S. DOL), May 2025 |
| Computer and information research scientists | $171,440 | BLS OEWS via O*NET OnLine (U.S. DOL), May 2025 |
| Data scientists | $170,110 | BLS OEWS via O*NET OnLine (U.S. DOL), May 2025 |
| Information security analysts | $162,310 | BLS OEWS via O*NET OnLine (U.S. DOL), May 2025 |
| Project management specialists | $135,040 | BLS OEWS via O*NET OnLine (U.S. DOL), May 2025 |
| Accountants and auditors | $110,730 | BLS OEWS via O*NET OnLine (U.S. DOL), May 2025 |
| Human resources specialists | $103,140 | BLS OEWS via O*NET OnLine (U.S. DOL), May 2025 |
Several tech roles pay more in the South Bay: the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro median is $213,110 for software developers and $218,420 for computer and information research scientists. Nationally, the software developer median is $135,980. Medians cover all employers and experience levels. For ranges by seniority, see the 2026 Salary Guide.
For employers
California sets more hiring rules than most states, and San Francisco adds its own. Current as of October 2026. General information, not legal advice.
Under SB 1162, employers with 15 or more employees, at least one in California, must include the pay scale in job postings, including postings placed through job boards and other third parties. Since January 1, 2026, SB 642 defines it as a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly range you reasonably expect to pay at hire. Penalties run $100 to $10,000 per violation.
California has barred employers from seeking an applicant's salary history since 2018. Any applicant can also ask for the pay scale of the job they applied for.
Business and Professions Code 16600 makes employee non-competes unenforceable, with narrow exceptions. Since January 1, 2024, SB 699 voids them regardless of where or when they were signed and lets workers sue. Protect trade secrets with confidentiality agreements instead.
AB 692 bars most contract terms signed since January 1, 2026 that make a worker pay when they leave: training repayment, quit fees, replacement costs. Signing-bonus and credential-tuition repayment is allowed only under strict conditions, such as a separate agreement and prorated repayment. Workers can recover at least $5,000 each.
California's Fair Chance Act and San Francisco's Fair Chance Ordinance both bar criminal-history questions before a conditional offer. The SF ordinance covers employers with five or more employees anywhere, staffing agencies included, for jobs averaging eight or more hours a week in the city, remote work included. Amendments effective August 10, 2026 bar considering out-of-state convictions for conduct legal in California and double the penalties.
Since October 1, 2025, California civil rights regulations cover automated-decision systems used in hiring, including resume screeners, online assessments and video-interview analysis. Liability reaches agents acting for the employer, and related records must be kept for four years. Bias testing isn't required but counts as evidence.
$19.61 an hour since July 1, 2026, for anyone who works at least two hours a week in the city, including temporary and part-time staff.
For job seekers
Coming out of a layoff or aiming for an AI role, these points work in your favor in California.
Most California postings must show a pay scale, and you can ask for it if one is missing. Compare it with the medians above and the 2026 Salary Guide before you negotiate.
If you work in California, an employee non-compete is generally void, even one signed in another state. Confidentiality and trade-secret duties still apply, so leave code and documents behind.
Name the model or tool, the data, what you measured and what changed. A side project with real users counts. Map your old title to the ones in our AI titles guide above.
For agreements signed since January 1, 2026, California bars most clauses that make you repay training costs or pay a fee when you leave. Signing-bonus repayment is allowed only on strict terms.
Contract and contract-to-hire work can add AI or infrastructure experience to your resume. Careerscape is free for job seekers, and your search stays confidential. Submit your resume or browse open jobs.
Where the work is
BLS splits the Bay Area into two metros: San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, which includes the Peninsula's San Mateo County and the East Bay, and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara for Silicon Valley. Transit access and commute direction often matter more than distance.
The center of AI office leasing. OpenAI is headquartered on Third Street in Mission Bay, Anthropic has offices in Mission Bay and at 500 Howard Street in SoMa, and in 2026 AI tenants also expanded at One Market and 181 Fremont.
Genentech, a Roche subsidiary, is headquartered in South San Francisco and Meta in Menlo Park. Caltrain has run fully electric service from San Francisco to San Jose since September 2024.
Nvidia is headquartered in Santa Clara. The San Jose metro's payrolls grew 1.6% over the year to September 2026, faster than San Francisco's, with unemployment at 4.3% in August (both preliminary).
Kaiser Permanente is headquartered in downtown Oakland, and UC Berkeley anchors Berkeley. BART connects both to downtown San Francisco.
Tesla's Fremont factory builds the Model 3 and Model Y. BART runs on from Fremont to Milpitas and Berryessa/North San José, opened in June 2020.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Department of Energy lab, sits on the eastern edge of Livermore.
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