Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall hiring landscape

  • Dozens of companies across stages (bootstrapped, seed, Series A–C, and big tech) are hiring, with many in AI, dev tools, security, fintech, and healthcare.
  • Roles skew strongly toward senior/staff-level: full-stack, backend, infra/SRE, ML/AI, data, and some product design/PM, with a few junior and intern opportunities.
  • Many firms are small (sub‑20 headcount) and explicitly want “founding” or early engineers with high ownership.

Technologies & domains

  • Common stacks:
    • Backend: Python, TypeScript/Node, Go, Java, Rust; Postgres, MySQL, ClickHouse, Redis.
    • Frontend: React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, TypeScript.
    • Infra: AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker.
  • Heavy emphasis on AI: LLM agents, RAG, multimodal models, evaluation frameworks, MLOps, and AI-powered products in finance, healthcare, legal, devtools, and productivity.
  • Other notable verticals: robotics/physical AI, climate/energy, security, blockchains, edtech, gov/regtech, and creative tools (design, gaming, audio/video).

Location & work style

  • Remote‑first is common (US, Canada, EU/UK, LATAM), often with time‑zone constraints; some roles are explicitly hybrid or fully onsite (SF Bay Area, NYC, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Zurich, etc.).
  • Several posts highlight in‑person culture as a selling point (small teams, high bandwidth, early-stage execution), while others emphasize async, low‑meeting environments.

Compensation & equity

  • Many listings provide explicit ranges, especially in the US: senior engineering often in the $150k–$250k base range plus equity; some EU roles list €60k–€140k, others note “competitive + meaningful equity.”
  • A few posters question compensation practices:
    • One company is challenged for promoting pay transparency while not posting ranges; they respond that location‑based pay makes ranges very wide and promise to improve disclosure.
    • Another is accused of advertising a higher salary band publicly than recruiters state on calls.
    • One commenter criticizes location‑based pay as exploitative; the company invites further discussion rather than debating in‑thread.

Process, expectations & culture

  • Common expectations: strong fundamentals, prior startup or early‑stage experience, end‑to‑end ownership, ability to move fast, and comfort working with or alongside AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, etc.).
  • Several posts stress product sense and direct customer contact, not just coding.
  • A few meta comments praise some products (e.g., analytics, editors, infra tools) and raise minor issues (e.g., broken forms, missing salary making CA posting non‑compliant).