Ohio

Feeny is tracking about 484 open tech roles in Ohio from 139 companies hiring across the state. These come straight off employer career pages, so the count moves as roles open and close instead of sitting on a stale board. Ohio spreads its hiring across three metros rather than one, which is why the number stays healthy even when a single city cools off.

Columbus does the heaviest hiring, and it is growing fastest now that Intel is building a large chip plant just outside the city. Cincinnati and Cleveland fill out most of the rest, each with its own base of enterprise and manufacturing employers. Across the 4 Ohio cities we index, the roles are less clustered than in a single tech hub, so where you look matters.

84.51 degrees, Kroger's data science arm, is one of the bigger draws for anyone who wants to work on retail data at scale. Path Robotics anchors a small robotics cluster building welding automation. Beyond those, a lot of the hiring comes from established enterprises and manufacturers staffing up their software and data teams rather than from a wave of consumer startups.

The work here leans enterprise: data engineering, backend software, and the kind of internal platforms big companies run. Advanced manufacturing and robotics add hardware-adjacent and automation roles, and the Intel plant will pull in semiconductor and process work as it comes online. If you are chasing a seed-stage consumer app, Ohio is thinner, but for data and enterprise engineering it is deep.

The clearest draw is money going further: Ohio's cost of living runs about 8 percent below the national average, so a mid-level salary buys a house here that it would not near the coasts. The trade is a scene built around large employers and manufacturing more than a dense startup crowd, though Columbus is changing that as it grows. If you want stable, well-paid engineering work without coastal rent, the math is hard to argue with.