Issue 05
Every other Tuesday, the ClearMatch agent reports what it saw in the Cleared GovCon job market: total volume, who's hiring, what skills are in demand, where the work sits. Anonymized aggregate intelligence built from the same daily scan the agent runs for every Cleared candidate on the platform. No promotional fluff.
Issue 04 tracked 27,724 Cleared roles across 244 employer career pages. This fortnight: 31,217 across 337. Most of that 13% growth is coverage — 93 net-new sources joined the scan, the largest single-issue expansion yet. Where Issue 04's gain was depth (reading the biggest primes in full), this issue's gain is breadth below them: the Cleared mid-market, the hundreds of services firms that staff the IC and DoD contracts the primes don't. Adding them changes the shape of the market more than its size, and there's one genuine rank move at the top worth reading closely.
Scan Volume
In the last 14 days, the agent scanned 79,551 GovCon contractor postings across 337 vetted employer careers pages.
Of those, 31,217 explicitly required Secret-or-above clearance. Roles surfaced to cleared candidates after scoring: 2,693.
Every count and share in this memo reflects the GovCon employer career pages the agent tracks — a large and growing sample, not the entire Cleared market. Figures like “share of demand” are of that tracked set.
Clearance Mix
Of the 31,217 cleared roles:
| Tier | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Secret | 16,106 | 51.6% |
| TS | 4,004 | 12.8% |
| TS/SCI | 5,740 | 18.4% |
| TS/SCI + CI Poly | 1,197 | 3.8% |
| TS/SCI + Full Scope Poly | 4,170 | 13.4% |
Secret is 51.6% of the Cleared market (16,106 roles). The move this fortnight is at the top of the stack: TS/SCI + Full Scope Poly reached 4,170 roles, 13.4% of the market — up from 3,316 and 12% last issue. Read that as coverage, not an IC hiring surge: the mid-market shops we added this fortnight skew hard toward poly-tier work. TS/SCI proper holds at 18.4% (5,740), TS/SCI + CI Poly at 3.8% (1,197). All told, 35.6% of Cleared roles sit at TS/SCI or above — the deepest read of the top of the stack we've published.
Confidential-tier roles excluded from totals above (56 in window — functionally rare in modern GovCon).
Top Hiring Contractors
GovCon employers with the most cleared (Secret+) postings:
| # | Contractor | Cleared | Most common tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lockheed Martin | 3,046 | Secret |
| 2 | Northrop Grumman | 2,697 | Secret |
| 3 | RTX (Raytheon / Collins / Pratt & Whitney) | 2,304 | Secret |
| 4 | Booz Allen Hamilton | 1,623 | Secret |
| 5 | Amentum | 1,334 | Secret |
| 6 | CACI | 1,286 | TS/SCI + FSP |
| 7 | Peraton | 1,148 | TS/SCI |
| 8 | Leidos | 1,084 | TS/SCI + FSP |
| 9 | GDIT (General Dynamics IT) | 835 | Secret |
| 10 | KBR | 549 | Secret |
Northrop Grumman overtakes RTX for #2 — 2,697 Cleared roles against 2,304, behind Lockheed Martin's 3,046 at #1. Both primes have been read at full depth since last issue, so this is real movement, not a measurement artifact: Northrop added roughly 640 Cleared postings in two weeks, up 31%, while Lockheed eased slightly from 3,108. Booz Allen holds #4 (1,623); Amentum climbs to #5 (1,334), trading places with CACI (#6, 1,286); Peraton (#7, 1,148), Leidos (#8, 1,084), GDIT (#9, 835), and KBR (#10, 549) round out the list.
The top 10 hold ~51% of Cleared demand, down from ~54% last issue. That's a dilution effect, not a pullback at the primes — 93 new mid-market sources grew the denominator. The concentration story from Issue 04 still stands: when you read the whole market, the primes are its center of gravity.
Coverage went from 244 employer career pages to 337 — 93 net new sources, the biggest single-issue add since the memo started. The profile is different this time. Prior expansions chased the frontier: new-space, defense-tech, the names on venture slides. This batch is the Cleared mid-market — IC-adjacent intel and cyber services shops (Acclaim Technical Services, The DarkStar Group, IntelliGenesis, Bluehawk, JASINT, CyberCore Technologies), a thicker Alaska Native and tribal bench (Chugach Government Solutions, Diné Development Corporation, Potawatomi Federal Solutions), research institutions (Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, ENSCO), and a few defense-tech entrants (Firefly Aerospace, Raft). Individually most post a few dozen Cleared roles. Collectively they shift the market's shape — the poly-tier share above is their signature. Several major primes and FFRDCs still aren't in the scan, so the true Cleared market remains larger than the numbers here.
Top Job Titles
The roles employers post most across the cleared pool:
| # | Title | Cleared postings |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Software Engineer | 787 |
| 2 | Systems Engineer | 770 |
| 3 | Systems Administrator | 281 |
| 4 | Program Manager | 278 |
| 5 | Network Engineer | 274 |
| 6 | Data Scientist | 199 |
| 7 | Software Developer | 143 |
| 8 | DevOps Engineer | 121 |
| 9 | Information System Security Officer | 109 |
| 10 | Electrical Engineer | 103 |
New this issue: the titles behind the numbers. Software Engineer (787 Cleared roles) and Systems Engineer (770) are essentially tied at the top, with a long drop to Systems Administrator (281), Program Manager (278), and Network Engineer (274). Data Scientist registers 199, and Information System Security Officer makes the top ten at 109 — every Cleared program needs its compliance seats filled. This table is now a standing section; from next issue we'll track which specialties move.
Titles are normalized before counting: seniority prefixes and level suffixes are merged into the base title, and clearance or work-mode tags are stripped — “Sr. Systems Engineer II (TS/SCI)” counts toward “Systems Engineer.”
Geographic Concentration
Where the cleared roles are based:
| Region | Cleared roles | Share |
|---|---|---|
| DC Metro | 8,628 | 34.1% |
| Huntsville | 853 | 3.4% |
| Los Angeles Metro | 817 | 3.2% |
| Massachusetts | 696 | 2.7% |
| Tucson | 602 | 2.4% |
| Colorado Springs | 424 | 1.7% |
| Tampa | 381 | 1.5% |
| Overseas | 333 | 1.3% |
| Remote-eligible | 308 | 1.2% |
| Hawaii / INDOPACOM | 239 | 0.9% |
| Denver Metro | 198 | 0.8% |
| San Antonio | 167 | 0.7% |
| St. Louis | 88 | 0.3% |
| Augusta | 55 | 0.2% |
| Other (distributed) | 11,533 | 45.5% |
DC Metro leads at 34.1% (8,628 roles), up a point from 33% — consistent with a fortnight of IC-heavy additions, whose work clusters in the Beltway and the Fort Meade orbit. Behind it: Huntsville at 3.4% (853, Redstone / missile defense), Los Angeles Metro at 3.2% (817, SoCal aerospace), Massachusetts at 2.7% (696), Tucson at 2.4% (602, RTX missile systems), Colorado Springs at 1.7% (424, Space Force / SPACECOM), and Tampa at 1.5% (381, CENTCOM/SOCOM). Overseas holds at 1.3% (333 roles — Germany, UK, and scattered elsewhere).
The 45.5% "Other" is the defense industrial base outside the named hubs — Fort Worth, Marietta, Melbourne, Orlando — the plant-site geography of the primes.
Locations are drawn from the postings themselves where available. About 19% of Cleared roles this fortnight carried no structured location and are excluded from the regional breakdown — holding steady with last issue.
Top Skills In Demand
Most frequently required across the cleared role pool:
| # | Skill | Cleared roles requiring |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Python | 5,544 |
| 2 | AWS | 3,504 |
| 3 | C++ | 2,748 |
| 4 | Docker | 2,202 |
| 5 | Kubernetes | 2,085 |
Python leads by a wide margin again (5,544 Cleared roles), wanted at every clearance tier. AWS holds #2 (3,504), C++ #3 (2,748) — still the defense-industrial tell, the mission-systems and avionics shops — with Docker (2,202) and Kubernetes (2,085) closing out the five, the ongoing DoD container-modernization push. This is the first fortnight with no rank movement in the table: every skill rose roughly in step with coverage. The mix is stabilizing as the scan matures.
Skill demand is measured across a set of in-demand GovCon skills we track, refreshed each quarter as the market shifts.
Adjacent Market: Public Trust
Public Trust isn’t a security clearance — it’s the federal suitability tier for civilian fed work (CISA, IRS, VA, USDA, HHS) handling sensitive-but-unclassified information. Included separately because many cleared candidates dual-purpose this pool between cleared engagements, and the demand signal is its own market.
In the last 14 days: 2,345 Public Trust-eligible postings.
Top hiring contractors
| Contractor | Count |
|---|---|
| Amentum | 241 |
| Contact Government Services | 237 |
| Guidehouse | 160 |
| Leidos | 159 |
| CACI | 125 |
| GDIT (General Dynamics IT) | 97 |
| GovCIO | 91 |
| Steampunk | 87 |
| Peraton | 87 |
| Akima | 72 |
Top regions
| Region | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Other (distributed) | 1,106 | 47.2% |
| DC Metro | 713 | 30.4% |
| Remote-eligible | 159 | 6.8% |
| Los Angeles Metro | 30 | 1.3% |
| San Antonio | 29 | 1.2% |
| Massachusetts | 22 | 0.9% |
| Overseas | 13 | 0.6% |
| Denver Metro | 11 | 0.5% |
| Huntsville | 6 | 0.3% |
| Colorado Springs | 4 | 0.2% |
| Hawaii / INDOPACOM | 4 | 0.2% |
| Tucson | 3 | 0.1% |
| Tampa | 2 | 0.1% |
| St. Louis | 1 | 0.0% |
Public Trust reached 2,345 roles, up from 2,079. Amentum takes the #1 spot at 241, edging past Contact Government Services (237, flat fortnight over fortnight), with Guidehouse (160), Leidos (159), and CACI (125) behind — civilian-fed services and the same primes whose Cleared volume anchors the top-10 table. Public Trust skews more remote-friendly than Cleared work: a different security posture, fewer SCIF dependencies.
Public Trust counts reflect JD postings that explicitly name "Public Trust," "MBI," or "Tier 1/2/4." Many civilian fed contractor roles are PT-eligible in practice but don't use that language in the listing — the agency runs the suitability investigation post-hire. Actual PT-eligible volume is materially higher than the explicit count shown here.
Founder Note
The honest read first: this issue's growth is coverage. 31,217 isn't a market that grew 13% in a fortnight — it's 93 more employer career pages on the scan, nearly all of them Cleared mid-market services firms. The Full Scope Poly share ticking up to 13.4% is the same story: we added the shops that live at the poly tiers, so the scan now sees more of that work.
What makes this issue different is what stayed still. For the first time, the biggest primes were measured on a stable basis fortnight over fortnight — same sources, same full-depth read — and one of them moved anyway. Northrop added roughly 640 Cleared postings in two weeks and passed RTX for #2. That's the kind of signal this memo exists to catch, and it's only legible once the measurement stops changing underneath it.
For candidates, the mid-market matters more than its size suggests. If you hold TS/SCI with a poly, the primes-only view undersells your market: a large share of poly-tier demand sits at firms like the ones that joined the scan this fortnight — names that don't run Super Bowl ads and don't show up on generic boards. Your agent now matches against them too.
— Rahul Pandhi Founder, ClearMatch