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Just when you thought Apple's fall-into-winter-into-spring hiring spree was settling down, it seems the tech giant has picked up right where it left off.

Job openings peaked at around 4,700 before the holiday season, settling down to around 4,200 in the New Year. But as of last month and leading into this week, Apple job openings have hit a new all-time high, cracking 5,000 for what appears to be the first time.

So, what are they hiring for? And where? We have that data.

As we've described recently, the hiring uptick has been in hardware engineering and design. But a snapshot of the most recent openings shows that engineering talent is clearly where the company is investing with both hardware and software engineer openings leading by a pretty large margin:

The above chart is a snapshot of Apple openings on March 7, 2018 (click on the image for a larger version). As you see, hardware engineering leads with 1,270 openings followed relatively closely by software engineering openings at 1,131. Operations comes in a distant third with 541 followed by a cluster of job categories all around 300 openings including sales, retail, and marketing.

It's clear where Apple's focus is right now as it gears up to bring a new bevvy of iPhones, HomePods, iPad, MacBooks, and whatever else they have up their sleeves (Cars? A smarter Siri? A new Mac Pro? Have they given up on networking hardware? So many questions!): Engineers, engineers, engineers.

As for where the openings are, they're largely concentrated at Apple's new spaceship-like headquarters in Santa Clara Valley, as the chart below shows.

Category City City (Count) Software Engineering Santa Clara Valley 933 Hardware Engineering Santa Clara Valley 912 Retail Various 314 Operations Santa Clara Valley 218 Information Systems and Technology Santa Clara Valley 183 Marketing Santa Clara Valley 124 Operations Shanghai (China APO Only) 89 Hardware Engineering Austin 88 Hardware Engineering Herzliya 67 Finance Santa Clara Valley 59

As always, we'll keep an eye on things as Apple continues to build.