How old are open job postings? A third of tech jobs were first posted 90+ days ago (one in 2019)

When you apply to a job, you usually don't know whether it was posted last week or last year. The careers page rarely shows a date. Most job boards behind those pages do store one, though.

I pulled every open job from 20 tech companies' public job boards and looked at when each one was first published.

Disclosure: I built the Career Site Jobs API used for this. It returns open jobs from Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Workday and other job boards as JSON, including the posting date.

The setup

• Companies: Airbnb, Airtable, Asana, Brex, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Databricks, Datadog, Discord, Dropbox, Figma, GitLab, Notion, Pinterest, Plaid, Ramp, Reddit, Robinhood, Stripe, Twilio
• Jobs: 4,794 open postings, every one with a date
• Date field: Greenhouse's first_published (17 companies) and Ashby's publishedAt (Notion, Plaid, Ramp)
• Snapshot: 25 October 2026

An important caveat: "first published" is the date the posting went live. If a company closes a job and reposts it, the clock resets. So these ages are a lower bound. Some roles have been open even longer than shown.

1. The typical open job is almost two months old

	Share of open jobs
Posted in the last 7 days	8%
Posted in the last 30 days	31%
Older than 90 days	33%
Older than 180 days	17%
Older than 1 year	7% (334 jobs)

The median open job was first posted 53 days ago. Only about a third of what you see on a careers page today went up in the last month.

2. Big differences between companies

Company	Open jobs	Median age	Older than 90 days
Databricks	897	100 days	53%
Figma	138	87 days	49%
Datadog	433	73 days	43%
Stripe	719	46 days	26%
Cloudflare	454	46 days	26%
Pinterest	163	24 days	18%
GitLab	239	29 days	12%

At Databricks, more than half of the open postings are older than three months. At GitLab and Pinterest, most postings are recent.

Neither end is "good" or "bad". A company that hires continuously for the same role, such as account executives or backend engineers in a growing org, often keeps one posting open for months and fills several seats from it. A company with mostly fresh postings may have just started new roles or reposts often.

3. The oldest still-open postings date back to 2019

The oldest jobs in the data, still open on 25 October 2026:

First posted	Company	Title
17 Apr 2019	Datadog	Commercial Account Executive, Boston
16 May 2019	Datadog	Commercial Account Executive
14 Nov 2019	Databricks	Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems
27 Jan 2021	Databricks	Senior Software Engineer, Database Engine Internals
27 Aug 2021	Databricks	Staff Data Scientist

Of the 334 jobs older than a year, Databricks accounts for 165 and Datadog for 57. The most common titles among them are "Strategic Account Executive" (13) and "Commercial Account Executive" (11), followed by staff and senior backend engineers.

These are almost certainly evergreen postings: always-open roles used to collect applications for a team that hires all the time. They're not fake, but applying to one is different from applying to a role someone opened last week for one specific seat.

4. Engineering and AI roles stay open longest

Role type (by title)	Jobs	Median age	Older than 90 days
AI / ML / agent roles	367	74 days	47%
Staff / Principal	598	76 days	43%
Engineering (all)	1,962	66 days	39%
Sales / GTM	1,323	46 days	31%
Intern / new grad	174	46 days	21%

Senior and AI roles stay open the longest. That fits the AI job title data from the same set: those roles skew senior, and senior specialists are slow to hire. Intern and graduate postings are the freshest, since they follow a hiring calendar.

5. Jobs go up mid-week, almost never on weekends

For postings from the last 60 days, by publishing day (UTC):

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
408	487	561	541	540	42	19

Wednesday is the busiest day. Saturday and Sunday together account for about 2%.

What to do with this

If you're applying:

• A fresh posting usually means a specific open seat and a recruiter actively screening. Apply early in the week the job goes up.
• An old posting isn't a dead end, but expect a pipeline role. Get a referral or contact the team directly rather than relying on the form alone.

If you're recruiting or selling to these companies:

• New postings are the hiring signal. A job first published this week says much more about current plans than a 2019 evergreen posting.
• Track new postings, not all open ones. That separates "this team just got budget" from "this team always hires".

Reproduce it, or track only new jobs

Input for the Career Site Jobs API:

{
  "companies": ["databricks", "datadog", "stripe", "gitlab"],
  "maxJobsPerCompany": 0
}

Every job comes back with postedAt (ISO date), so the age is one subtraction. To get only postings that appeared since the last run, set "onlyNewJobs": true with a monitorName and schedule it daily. You then get new jobs only, which by the logic above are the ones that matter. Pricing is $2 per 1,000 jobs, and with onlyNewJobs you only pay for new ones.

Takeaways

1. The median open tech job is 53 days old, and a third are older than 90 days.
2. Companies differ a lot: Databricks 53% of postings older than 90 days, GitLab 12%.
3. Some postings have been open since 2019. Those are evergreen pipeline roles, mostly sales and senior engineering.
4. AI and Staff+ roles stay open longest. Intern and grad roles are the freshest.
5. For applicants and recruiters alike, the useful signal is new postings.

Comments

[Kevin Hall]

Your caveat that a repost resets the clock is the part I'd measure next, because it's big. I looked at it from the other side this week, on LinkedIn backend postings, where a posting stays in the data after it closes. About one employer role in eight was closed and posted again as a new posting within 90 days. Agencies and job boards were worse: in the UK, 60% of their postings closed within three days, and most came back a few days later under a new id.

So a careers page undercounts age, as you say, and on a job board "posted 2 days ago" often means "reposted". Did any of the 20 companies have the same title open twice with different first_published dates? That would be the repost signature on the ATS side.