Location
San Jose, CA
Wage
$30/hr
Employment Type
Full-time
Posted on October 12, 2026
Anytime Welding, Inc. is one of the oldest Steel Contractors in the South Bay area, providing various construction services including structural steel and metal fabrication. They are seeking motivated individuals for the position of Lead Shop Welder/Architectural Steel Fabricator.
At roughly $30/hr, this posting comes in about 48% below the $58/hr median for lead welder jobs across California, where the middle half runs $47–$60/hr across 20 postings with published pay. Put another way, it pays more than about 10% of the comparable postings we have wage data for. That gap is worth raising directly — in a market this size there is normally room to negotiate toward the median, particularly if you already hold the certifications the posting asks for.
San Jose, CA currently has 6 other active welding openings besides this one, spread across 6 employers. 2 of them were added in the last week. Across California as a whole we're tracking 559 other active welding openings from 266 employers. That's enough local activity to be worth comparing two or three offers before committing. Browse every welding job in San Jose, or widen the search to California.
The most active employers in California at the moment, by number of open welding reqs, are SpaceX (36), Relativity Space (21), and Welding Shop in Los Angeles, CA (16). Volume like that usually means either a genuine expansion or a staffing agency working several client sites — worth knowing which before you apply.
Within California, the best-paying metros we track by median hourly rate are Redondo Beach at $65/hr, Pasadena at $61/hr, and Santa Ana at $48/hr. If you can relocate or commute, that spread is worth factoring in.
This posting calls for MIG, TIG, and Flux-Core work. MIG (GMAW) feeds a continuous wire electrode through a shielding-gas nozzle. It lays down metal fast and is forgiving on clean material, which is why it dominates production and light fabrication work. TIG (GTAW) uses a non-consumable tungsten electrode with filler added by hand, giving the operator the most control of any process. It is slow, demanding, and the standard for stainless, aluminum, and anything where the bead has to look as good as it holds.
See all lead welder openings if you want to compare this against similar roles.
Pay figures are medians computed from live postings in the Welding Pros index, not from survey data, and they move as employers post. Lead Shop Welder/ Architectural Steel Fabricator figures were last recalculated when this page was built.