Methodology
Data sources
At MVP, Design Drift ingests job listings from Greenhouse's public Job Board API (boards-api.greenhouse.io). Additional sources (Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Dribbble Jobs RSS, Adzuna, and LinkedIn via Apify) roll in during Phase 2.
What counts as a "design" listing
We filter listings by title using a keyword list covering product designer, UX designer, design engineer, content designer, brand designer, UX researcher, design manager/director/lead/head, and emerging titles such as AI Product Designer and Design Systems Engineer.
Canonicalization
Raw titles (e.g., "Sr. Product Designer, Growth") map to canonical role slugs via a curated taxonomy at src/lib/taxonomies/roles.ts. Emerging titles that don't match any canonical role are queued for human review.
Salary data
Salary figures come from two places: (a) structured compensation fields returned by some ATS providers (Ashby), and (b) regex extraction from the listing text. We publish aggregate statistics only on pages with at least 5 listings disclosing a salary range, and we always show the sample size (n=X).
Cadence
Scrapes run daily at 06:00 UTC. Aggregation runs at 07:00 UTC. Pages revalidate after aggregation via tag-based ISR. The dateModified on every page reflects the last aggregation run, not the last deploy.
Byline and AI disclosure
Data curation by Brian Tighe. Analysis is assisted by Claude (Anthropic); all published conclusions are reviewed by the editor.
Limitations
- MVP covers Greenhouse companies only — additional sources in Phase 2.
- Seed data (Kaggle LinkedIn postings 2023–2024) is visibly separated from live data on all time-series charts.
- Company stage is inferred from context; some listings carry
UNKNOWN.