Most people searching for startup jobs open LinkedIn, type in a job title and apply to the same postings as a few thousand other candidates. By the time a role appears there, the founder has often been speaking to people for weeks, because early teams tend to hire through newsletters, small communities and their own networks first.
If you want to know how to find startup jobs before they get crowded, you need to read what founders and investors read. This guide covers 10 underrated places to find startup jobs, including curated job boards, weekly newsletters, in-person events and one data source that almost nobody treats as a hiring signal.
You will also find a short section on niche searches, such as remote machine learning roles, Angular roles, biotech roles you can do from home and jobs at therapy startups.
Why the Best Startup Jobs Rarely Start on LinkedIn
A startup with 12 people has no recruiting team, so the founder usually handles hiring personally and starts with the cheapest and fastest channels available. That means telling investors, asking friends at other startups, and sending the role to a newsletter writer whose readers already work in tech.
A public job post tends to come last, once those channels have failed to produce a hire. Candidates who only watch the big job sites are therefore competing for the roles that were hardest to fill through a network, and they are doing it alongside everyone else.
The resources below move you earlier in that sequence. Some of them list open roles, while others simply tell you which companies are growing fast enough that they will need to hire soon.
10 Underrated Places to Find Startup Jobs
1. Next Play
Next Play is a newsletter and community started by Ben Lang and Jordan Gonen in 2024 for people working out their next career move. Each edition groups opportunities by type, so you will see early teams making their first hires, startups that are scaling, co-founder searches and a handful of roles at venture firms.
The listings are written like introductions, with a line about who the founder is and what they have built before, which gives you something specific to mention when you reach out. The main newsletter is free, and a paid tier adds extra lists and a private Slack group. Next Play also runs small gatherings in more than 20 cities.
Best for: operators, engineers and former founders who want early-stage roles and warm context on the people hiring.
2. Ramp's Vendor Reports
Ramp publishes no job listings at all, and that is exactly why so few job seekers read it. The company runs a corporate card and bill pay platform, and it uses the anonymized spending of tens of thousands of businesses to show which software vendors are winning new customers each month.
Its Ramp Rate directory and the monthly top vendors posts split companies into two groups: those that are trending relative to their size and those adding the most customers overall. A startup that keeps appearing on the trending list is selling faster than its team can support, and that almost always turns into open roles in sales, customer success and engineering.
Use the lists to build a target list of 10 to 15 companies, then check their careers pages directly or write to the team before a role is posted.
Best for: anyone who would rather pick a fast-growing company first and find the right role second.
3. Shortlist Jobs
Shortlist Jobs tracks a curated set of venture-backed startups and watches them for hiring signals such as new funding, headcount changes, leadership moves and updates to their team pages. You upload a resume, set preferences for role, stage, remote work and pay, and the product alerts you when a matching role opens.
The most useful part is the watchlist of companies that have nothing posted yet. Shortlist flags startups that have just raised and are likely to open a certain kind of role soon, which gives you time to introduce yourself before there is a queue.
The matching product is still in waitlist at the time of writing, but the public job listings and company directory are already live and can be filtered by work type, funding stage and industry.
Best for: people who are employed, not in a rush, and want to hear about the right role early without checking job sites every day.
4. Hacker News "Who's Hiring" Threads
On the first weekday of every month, an account called whoishiring posts a thread on Hacker News where companies reply with their open roles. Most replies are written by a founder or an engineer on the team, they state location and remote policy at the top, and many include a direct email address.
The thread is plain text and can run to several hundred comments, so searching matters more than scrolling. Use your browser's find function for terms such as REMOTE, your city, or a specific technology, and read the newest threads first since older listings fill quickly.
Best for: engineers and technical candidates who want to skip recruiters and write to the person doing the hiring.
5. a16z Build
a16z Build is a dinner series, community and newsletter that Andreessen Horowitz runs for founders and operators who are between chapters. Members hear about openings at promising startups before those roles reach job boards, and the firm hosts hiring nights where candidates meet founders in person.
You have to apply or be nominated to join the community. The Build newsletter is open to everyone, though, and it sends a regular roundup of open roles at newly funded startups and well-known growth companies.
Best for: experienced operators and engineers who want roles at well-funded companies, particularly in AI.
6. Breakout List
Breakout List has been around since 2014 and is built on a piece of advice Sam Altman is known for, which is that you should join a company already on a breakout trajectory. It is a curated list of startups worth joining, and the latest edition reportedly includes 92 companies, 20 of which have 25 or fewer employees.
Treat it as a research shortcut. The list tells you where to look, and you then go to each company's careers page or contact the founders yourself. The creator discloses small personal investments in a few of the companies, which is worth keeping in mind as you read.
Best for: early-career candidates and anyone who wants a short, opinionated list of companies to target.
7. Lenny's Jobs
Lenny's Jobs comes from Lenny Rachitsky, who writes one of the most widely read newsletters in product and growth, and it is built with the job data company TrueUp. The site pulls in open roles from startups and large tech companies, then removes ghost roles and generic staffing agency posts.
Two features make it worth a regular visit. Roles marked with a community tag come from Lenny's subscriber Slack and his monthly hiring posts, and many of them are listed nowhere else. The Lenny 100 is his own list of the companies he would most want to join if he were job hunting today.
The site is free to use, with extra AI features and job alerts for paid newsletter subscribers.
Best for: product managers, growth and marketing people, designers and engineers at Series A companies and later.
8. Cosign
Cosign is a curated professional network for the startup world that a16z introduced on its podcast in September 2026. Profiles combine your work history with public endorsements, called cosigns, from people who have worked with you, and the network includes a jobs section with roles from member companies.
The product is still in beta, so the number of listings is small compared with an established job board. The reason to join early is the reputation side, because founders can see who vouches for you before they ever read your resume.
Best for: people with a strong track record and former colleagues willing to vouch for them.
9. Y Combinator's Work at a Startup
Work at a Startup is Y Combinator's free hiring platform, launched in 2018. You create one profile and use it to apply to any YC company, and founders can also search profiles and message candidates directly.
Every company on the board has been through YC, so you start with a baseline of funding and vetting that a general job site cannot offer. You can filter by role, location, remote work and company size, and many postings state salary and equity ranges up front. YC also runs career expos and hiring meetups for job seekers throughout the year.
Best for: engineers, designers and product people who want founding or early-team roles at funded startups.
10. Founders You Should Know
Founders You Should Know is a community that hosts monthly in-person startup showcases in San Francisco. A small group of founders who are hiring present their companies to a room of engineers and operators, and everyone gets time to talk afterwards.
You apply to attend, and the audience is kept small on purpose. Ten minutes of conversation with a founder tells you more about a company than any job description, and the founder remembers your face when your application arrives the next morning.
Best for: engineers and operators in the Bay Area who interview better in person than on paper.
How to Find Startup Jobs in a Specific Niche
Broad searches for startup jobs return thousands of results, so narrowing by skill or sector saves a lot of time. The same 10 resources work for niche searches if you use them the right way.
- Startup machine learning remote jobs: search the latest Hacker News thread for REMOTE together with ML or machine learning, and read the a16z Build newsletter, which leans heavily towards AI companies. Ramp's trending lists are also dominated by AI startups, which makes them a good source of companies to approach.
- Angular startup jobs: framework-specific roles are easiest to find where companies describe their stack in their own words. Search the Hacker News thread for Angular, and use the keyword search on Work at a Startup.
- From home biotech startup jobs: lab roles are rarely remote, but computational biology, data, regulatory and operations roles often are. Shortlist's company directory has a Biotech and Pharma category along with a Remote work type, and YC's platform includes science roles at its biotech startups.
- Therapy startup jobs: mental health startups hire licensed clinicians as well as product, operations and engineering staff. Start with the HealthTech category on Shortlist, then search Lenny's Jobs and Work at a Startup by company name once you have a list of names.
A Simple Weekly Routine
You do not need all 10 resources at once, and trying to follow everything usually means following nothing well. A routine that takes about an hour a week is enough to stay ahead of most applicants.
- Subscribe once: sign up for Next Play and the a16z Build newsletter, and join the Shortlist waitlist so alerts come to you.
- Check weekly: spend 20 minutes on Lenny's Jobs and Work at a Startup with your filters saved.
- Check monthly: read the new Hacker News thread in its first two days and Ramp's latest top vendors post, then add any new names to your target list.
- Reach out directly: write to two or three founders a week with a short note on what you would do in the role, even when nothing is posted.
FAQs
How do I find startup jobs?
Start with sources that founders use before they post publicly. Weekly newsletters such as Next Play and a16z Build, curated boards such as Lenny's Jobs and Work at a Startup, and the monthly Hacker News hiring thread will show you roles earlier than a general job site.
Where can I search for startup jobs hiring now?
Work at a Startup, Lenny's Jobs and the Shortlist job listings all show roles that are open today. The Hacker News thread resets on the first weekday of each month, so everything in the current thread was posted within the last few weeks.
Where can I find fully remote tech startup jobs?
Use the remote filter on Work at a Startup and the Remote work type in Shortlist's company directory. In the Hacker News thread, companies mark remote roles with the word REMOTE in the first line of their post, which makes them easy to search for. You can also check our list of remote work platforms specifically for remote jobs.
What are the best remote startup jobs available?
Engineering, machine learning, product, design, growth and customer success are the functions most often hired remotely at startups. The best role for you depends on the stage of the company, so ask about runway, recent funding and how the team communicates across time zones before you accept.
Is LinkedIn still useful for finding a startup job?
It is useful for research and for contacting founders once you have a target company in mind. As a place to discover roles it is crowded, and the resources in this guide will usually show you the same openings earlier.
How do I know if a startup is a safe place to work?
No startup is risk-free, but you can reduce the risk by checking when the company last raised money, who invested and whether customers are growing. Ramp's vendor data and curated lists such as Breakout List and the Lenny 100 are quick ways to check that a company has real momentum.
A new funding round is one of the clearest signs that a startup is about to hire. The Everything Startups New VC Funds Database tracks newly announced venture funds every week, which shows where early-stage money is heading and which sectors are likely to be hiring next.
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