Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall hiring landscape

  • Very wide range of roles: early-stage startups to large enterprises, across AI infra/agents, devtools, fintech, climate/energy, robotics, healthcare, gov/defense, gaming, and education.
  • Strong emphasis on AI-native or “agentic” products: many companies hiring for LLM infra, agents, evals, RL environments, RAG systems, and AI-assisted dev tooling.
  • Infra-heavy and data roles are common: distributed systems, Kubernetes, observability, databases, data platforms, and SRE/platform engineering show up repeatedly.
  • Many orgs highlight being profitable or bootstrapped, or at least well-funded with multi‑year runway, and pitch high autonomy, ownership, and small senior teams.

Remote vs onsite and geography

  • Both fully-remote and strict-onsite roles are present. Several posts are hybrid with 2–4 days/week in office.
  • Some confusion in thread over remote eligibility; a few posters clarify that certain roles are explicitly in-office despite sounding flexible (e.g., Cloudflare PM, Strobe, some EU roles).
  • Visa sponsorship appears selectively: some EU and NL/DE companies sponsor “highly skilled migrants”; many US roles explicitly cannot sponsor.
  • Geographic focus clusters: lots of roles in SF/NYC/London/Berlin plus remote US/EU; some mention time zone constraints (e.g., CET ± a few hours, US Eastern overlap).

Compensation and job‑market commentary

  • Salaries range from relatively low local rates to top‑tier US comp (several $200k–$300k+ roles).
  • One German grant‑funded role (~59k EUR) triggers debate: some call it “crazy low,” others point to a “crashed” German tech market where some devs would accept 60k, while others insist senior full‑stack engineers won’t.
  • A few commenters criticize postings with demanding requirements but modest pay or no benefits; moderation steers such criticism away as off‑topic for this thread.

Tech-stack and community reactions

  • Noticeable excitement when less common stacks appear: Haskell in production, Elixir/Erlang roles, Clojure, Rust, and WebGPU.
  • PostHog’s public handbook and compensation calculator draw praise; some discuss location‑based pay quirks.
  • Several posts stress AI‑assisted development (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot) and even “AI‑native” culture.

Meta: applications, moderation, navigation

  • Some candidates mention applying and being rejected without feedback; others note this is now common and automated. Moderators repeatedly detach such subthreads and remind users of “who is hiring” rules.
  • Tools are shared to help browse the dense thread, including a European jobs aggregator and an AI-powered search/chat interface over the postings.