Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2025)

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Job types & domains

  • Very strong presence of AI/ML, “agentic” systems, and LLM-related roles: autonomous agents, workflow automation, data labeling/evals, multimodal and edge AI, social/group-chat AI, and AI copilots across healthcare, legal, supply chain, and customer support.
  • Many core infrastructure and data roles: distributed systems, databases, observability, data platforms, stream processing, storage engines, devtools (IDEs, auth, CI/CD, infra orchestration, cloud cost, web3 infra).
  • Application domains include: healthcare and clinical AI, fintech and payments, legaltech, real estate and construction, robotics (industrial, drones, bricklaying, space/AV), gaming, creative tools, sports analytics, martech and adtech, education/learning, and government/defense.
  • A notable fraction of roles are founding or early hires (0→1 product, first engineers, staff-level ownership), especially at YC and other seed/Series A startups.

Seniority, stack & expectations

  • Majority of roles target senior/staff/lead engineers, architects, and managers; relatively few explicit junior openings, though some companies note openness to strong generalists or interns.
  • Common stacks: TypeScript/React/Next.js, Python/FastAPI, Go, Rust, Java, Node, Rails, Postgres, ClickHouse, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP/Azure; many mention experience with LLM APIs, RAG, LangChain/LangGraph, or vector stores as a plus.
  • Several posts stress end‑to‑end product ownership, shipping quickly, and comfort with ambiguous, cross-functional work over narrow specialization.

Remote, location & visas

  • Many companies advertise “remote” but clarify constraints: US-only, Canada-only, EU/UK-only, or specific time-zone overlaps; follow-up comments frequently ask for this clarification.
  • Onsite and hybrid roles cluster in SF Bay Area, NYC, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich, and a few secondary hubs (Austin, Seattle, Toronto, Bangalore, Mauritius).
  • Multiple threads ask about visa sponsorship or relocation; answers are mixed but often “no sponsorship.”

Compensation & transparency

  • Some roles include explicit salary bands (often high for US staff-level positions); others omit them, prompting reminders of legal requirements (e.g., California pay transparency) and questions from readers.
  • Equity is frequently highlighted at early-stage startups; some posts emphasize profitability and lack of VC funding instead.

Process & meta-discussion

  • A few companies are criticized for heavy or opaque hiring processes (e.g., multiple unpaid take-home projects, repeated postings over years, fast rejections).
  • Minor issues like broken links, misconfigured email addresses, and API “challenge” keys are surfaced and quickly corrected.
  • Several commenters use the thread to signal they’ve just applied, ask about specific constraints, or give personal testimonials (both positive and cautionary) about past employers.