Where America's heavy equipment is actually built — and who's hiring right now

When most people think about the heavy equipment industry, they picture dealerships — yellow Cat machines on the lot, a service bay full of techs, a sales rep in a polo shirt. But the dealers are downstream. The real heart of the industry is the manufacturing plants — and they're concentrated in places you might not expect.

We pulled current openings from seven major equipment OEMs on Equipment Industry Jobs and mapped where they're hiring. The picture that emerged tells you a lot about how this industry actually works.

The seven manufacturers we tracked

These are corporate and plant-level openings — not dealer jobs, not service contracts, not territory sales reps. Just the people who design and build the machines:

• John Deere — Moline, IL headquarters; major plants in Iowa
• Caterpillar — Menominee, MI hose assembly facility (their main HQ moved to Texas, but this is the active US plant on our radar)
• Kubota — Grapevine, TX corporate; Gainesville and Jefferson, GA manufacturing
• JCB — Pooler, GA plus a new and rapidly-growing San Antonio, TX plant
• Bobcat (Doosan Bobcat NA) — North Dakota corporate, plus plants in Statesville NC, Litchfield MN, and Johnson Creek WI
• AriensCo — Brillion, WI (Ariens, Gravely, Stens brands)
• BOSS Snowplow — Iron Mountain, MI

Combined, these seven companies are hiring for 319 open positions on our board right now.

The seven hubs where it's happening

The hiring is concentrated. Almost half of all OEM jobs are in just seven cities:

• Brillion, Wisconsin — 33 jobs (AriensCo). The Ariens family business has been here since 1933, and the campus has grown to the point that they run their own on-site health clinic and KinderCare discount partnership. The northeastern Wisconsin labor market basically runs through this facility.
• San Antonio, Texas — 24 jobs (JCB). This is the new story. JCB is standing up a major new plant here, and the hiring has barely started.
• Pooler, Georgia — 22 jobs (JCB). JCB's North American HQ near Savannah, where they build skid steers and backhoe loaders for the U.S. military and commercial markets since 2000.
• Gainesville, Georgia — 21 jobs (Kubota). KMA (Kubota Manufacturing of America) employs over 3,500 people building tractors and mowers for the North American market. The Gainesville-Jefferson corridor is one of the most underrated equipment manufacturing centers in the country.
• Grapevine, Texas — 20 jobs (Kubota corporate). The Dallas-Fort Worth area is increasingly an OEM corporate hub — Kubota moved its U.S. headquarters here in 2017, and Caterpillar's headquarters is just up the road in Irving.
• Iron Mountain, Michigan — 11 jobs (BOSS Snowplow). Michigan's Upper Peninsula has one of the most specialized equipment manufacturers in the country here — virtually every snowplow you see on a U.S. pickup truck is built within a few miles of this plant.
• Waterloo, Iowa — 11 jobs (John Deere). The Quad Cities + Waterloo corridor (Moline, East Moline, Dubuque, Waterloo) is where John Deere does most of its U.S. manufacturing. Iowa alone accounts for nearly half of John Deere's open corporate roles right now.

What's actually being hired

The role mix tells you a lot about each company's strategy. Three patterns:

Pure manufacturing shops are AriensCo and BOSS Snowplow — between them, 28 of 53 open jobs are production roles (assemblers, welders, painters, machine operators). These are companies still making "manual" outdoor power equipment where the product is largely mechanical, not electronic. If you want a steady hourly wrench-and-weld job in a single location, this is where to look.

Engineering-heavy shops are John Deere and Kubota. Combined, they have 70 open engineering roles versus 18 manufacturing roles. Both companies are betting heavily on autonomy, precision ag, and connected equipment — which means software engineers, embedded firmware developers, and data scientists are the hires they need most. The job titles are increasingly unrecognizable to old-school equipment people: "Software Test Engineer," "Guidance, Navigation and Control Engineer," "Embedded Systems Engineer."

Balanced shops are JCB, Bobcat, and Caterpillar's Menominee plant — meaningful counts in production, engineering, AND sales/service. These are mid-sized OEMs running diverse operations in single locations.

What this means if you're thinking about an OEM career

If you're a tradesperson — assembler, welder, machine operator, painter, electrician — Brillion WI, Iron Mountain MI, Gainesville GA, and the JCB plants in Pooler GA and San Antonio TX are where the volume is. Wages for these roles are typically in the $18-$28/hr range with benefits from day one.

If you're an engineer — software, electrical, mechanical, manufacturing — the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities corridor is the densest market in the country for equipment engineering work. John Deere has open roles paying up to $170K+ for senior software roles, and Kubota's autonomous vehicle group is actively hiring across Texas and Georgia.

If you're in sales, service, or operations — the OEM side is smaller than the dealer side, but offers something dealers can't: corporate brand exposure, structured career ladders, and bigger geographic territories. JCB alone has 15 open sales roles spanning the entire U.S.

The honest read

The U.S. equipment manufacturing industry doesn't have the same name recognition as automotive or aerospace, but it's a real, growing employer base — and one with serious long-term tailwinds (infrastructure spending, ag-tech investment, supply chain reshoring). The companies are quietly hiring across small and mid-sized Midwest and Southeast cities where you can actually afford to live on the wages they pay.

If you've been thinking about working for one of the brands that built the machine you ran today, the opening is wider than you'd think.

Browse all 319 open OEM positions — across John Deere, Caterpillar, Kubota, JCB, Bobcat, AriensCo, and BOSS Snowplow — on Equipment Industry Jobs.

Data pulled from active job postings on equipmentindustryjobs.com as of May 2026. Job counts and locations reflect company hiring at that point in time.