Sixty-seven days. That is the median time it now takes to fill a software engineering role in the Bay Area, up from roughly 38 days a year earlier. Almost double, in twelve months, in the market that is supposed to move fastest in the country.
If you are a candidate three months into a search, that number is not an insult. It is a description of the system you are moving through. If you are a hiring manager watching a requisition sit open for two months, it is the same description. Nobody broke the process. It got slower for reasons that have very little to do with any individual resume or any individual req.
More jobs, not fewer
Here is the part that doesn't fit the doom narrative: software engineering job openings hit roughly 67,000 in the first quarter of 2026, the highest count since early 2023, and about 11% higher than the same quarter a year before. Demand did not collapse. By the headline number, it grew, fast enough that recruiting teams built for a leaner year are now underwater.
But the headline number is misleading taken on its own, because it is measured against a base that is still deeply depressed. Engineering roles overall remain roughly 49% below their pre-pandemic baseline. So the honest picture is not a hot market and not a cold one. It is a market climbing out of a hole that is still about half as deep as it used to be, with more requisitions open than there were three years ago and fewer than half as many as there were before the hole existed. Both things are true. Neither one cancels the other out.
Why 67 days makes sense from here
Slow hiring in that kind of market is not a mystery once you look at what both sides are working with. Every open role now draws from a candidate pool that spent the last two years absorbing layoffs, hiring freezes, and a wave of mass, low-effort applications that made every posting harder to filter. Every hiring team is working with fewer recruiters than it had in 2021, evaluating more applicants per role, and under more pressure to get the decision right the first time, because budget for a second search isn't guaranteed the way it used to be.
Some of the slowdown is procedural rather than structural. Teams that got burned by a bad hire tend to add steps rather than remove them: another interview round, another stakeholder sign-off, another round of reference or background checks before an offer goes out. Each step is defensible on its own. Stacked together, they add weeks. None of it shows up in the job posting. All of it shows up in the 67 days.
A single senior opening can now draw candidate volumes that would have looked absurd in 2021, much of it inflated by how easy it has become to fire off dozens of applications in an afternoon. The right candidate is usually somewhere in that pile. Finding them takes longer when the noise around them gets louder, not because they became any harder to find in principle.
None of that is a verdict on the quality of any specific candidate or any specific company. A 67-day search says something about 2026. It does not say something about you. The market is not broken, it is recalibrating, at a pace slower than anyone on either side of the table would like. That is worth remembering the next time a search feels like it is dragging for no reason. There is a reason. It is just bigger than any one req. Sixty-seven days is not a crisis. It is where the math lands this year.