Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2026)

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Hundreds of engineers, designers, data and security specialists use this monthly Hacker News hiring thread to pitch themselves directly to potential employers. Posts span senior backend, DevOps, embedded and product roles through to AI/LLM agents, RAG systems, evaluation frameworks, and traditional web and mobile development, with many candidates emphasizing experience in early-stage startups, regulated domains, and AI-assisted coding. The thread highlights a global, remote-first talent pool—from North America and Europe to Africa and Asia—largely seeking impactful work, technical ownership, and long-term collaborations rather than short-lived gigs.

Roles and seniority

  • Wide spread from interns/juniors to staff, principal, founding engineer, CTO/CPTO, and fractional CTO.
  • Heavy concentration of senior backend, full‑stack, platform, and DevOps/SRE engineers.
  • Many specialists: mobile (iOS/Android/React Native), embedded/firmware, data engineering, ML/AI, security, GPU/CUDA, Windows internals, game/graphics, and product/UX designers.
  • Several engineering leaders and managers looking for hands‑on leadership roles.

Technical domains and stacks

  • Common web stack: TypeScript/JavaScript with React/Next.js, Node/Nest, Python/FastAPI or Django, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP/Azure.
  • Strong presence of Ruby on Rails, Go, Rust, Java/Spring, C#/.NET, PHP/Laravel, Elixir/Phoenix.
  • Niche areas include: CRDTs, real‑time systems, payments/fintech, telecom/VoIP, geospatial, IoT/industrial, HPC, databases and storage engines, compiler/runtime work.

AI / LLM and agent systems

  • Many candidates focus on applied AI: RAG, graphRAG, LLM agents, LangGraph/LangChain, MCP servers, eval harnesses, guardrails, security gateways, cost routing, and self‑hosted inference.
  • Repeated emphasis on correctness, evaluation, and human‑in‑the‑loop: state‑drift analysis, tool‑call validation, hallucination mitigation, permission boundaries, and citation‑backed answers.
  • Several have built production AI systems in regulated domains (healthcare, finance, pharma, legal).

Work arrangements and location preferences

  • Almost everyone prefers remote; many are open to hybrid locally, fewer to full relocation.
  • Global distribution: US, Canada, Europe/UK, India, Pakistan, MENA, LatAm, Africa, and East Asia.
  • Mix of full‑time employment seekers and contractors/fractional roles, with some clearly optimized for B2B/EOR setups.

Quality, reliability, and security themes

  • Frequent focus on performance tuning, high‑availability backends, database optimization, and large‑scale migrations.
  • Multiple specialists in cloud security, DevSecOps, SOC/detection engineering, and AI security (prompt injection, tool abuse).
  • Several highlight rigorous testing: property‑based tests, Playwright/Cypress, CI gates, hardware‑in‑the‑loop testing, and long‑running autonomous systems that “don’t silently fail.”

Non‑engineering and hybrid roles

  • A smaller but notable set of candidates for: business analysis, data/AI‑driven growth, marketing/BD/partnerships, AI policy, UX/UI and product design, creative technologists, and operations/AI adoption.

Attitudes toward AI coding tools

  • Many use Claude Code/Codex/Cursor heavily, but stress human review, specs, and verification.
  • A minority explicitly avoid or de‑emphasize AI coding, preferring traditional workflows.