The state of startup hiring: November 2026

Every day, RoleRoo reads the careers pages of 4,746 startups backed by firms like Sequoia, Accel, General Catalyst and Y Combinator. Over the last month that came to 85,079 roles at 3,082 companies, taken straight from employers' own job boards rather than from aggregators or LinkedIn.

This is the first edition of a report we'll publish every quarter. It's what the data says about who startups are hiring, what they pay, where the roles are, and how fast you have to move. Where we can, we also compare it with two and a half years of data from FixMyResume, our resume tool, on which roles job seekers are actually going for.

The short version

Finding 01Startups add about 5,400 roles a week, and almost all of them on weekdays

Once our first crawl had cleared the backlog of roles that were already open, new postings settled at a steady rate over the last two full weeks: about 5,400 a week, or 1,100 every working day, at the companies we were already tracking. That's the real flow of new opportunities. It doesn't include roles that had been sitting open for months.

Startups post the way they work. Tuesday is the busiest day, and Saturday and Sunday together account for just 3.4% of postings. If you check for new roles once a week, Wednesday morning catches most of the week's batch.

Finding 02Engineering leads, but sales is the quiet giant

Software engineering is still the single biggest function, at 18% of all roles. Add AI, DevOps, security, data and hardware and technical roles make up 37% of startup hiring.

The surprise is how close sales comes. On its own it's 14% of roles. Add marketing, customer success and support, and go-to-market is 25% of everything startups are hiring for, more than software engineering. Funded startups have built the product; now they need people to sell it.

Design and product management are small by comparison, at 2.7% and 3.4%. A typical startup hires one product manager for every five or six engineers.

Finding 03AI is now part of most jobs, not just AI jobs

Only 7.7% of roles have AI in the title: machine learning engineers, applied scientists, people who build agents. But 60% of all job descriptions mention AI somewhere, and it's no longer just the technical ones.

71% of design roles, 71% of customer success roles, 69% of product roles and 64% of sales roles now ask for AI in some form. That might be using AI tools day to day, selling an AI product, or designing for one. Only healthcare and hardware still mostly leave it out.

There's a second pattern. The longer a role has been open, the more likely it is to be an AI role. Of the roles posted in April that are still open, 10.7% have AI in the title. For roles posted in October, it's 5.3%.

We can't fully separate two explanations: AI roles are harder to fill, or startups are posting relatively fewer of them. Either way, if you have real experience shipping AI, you're the candidate those long-open roles are waiting for.

Finding 04The entry-level door is barely open

Just 4.6% of startup roles are entry level or junior. Almost half have no level in the title, which usually means mid-level, and nearly a third say staff, lead or manager. Startups mostly hire people who've done the job before.

Where there are junior roles, they're in operations (11%), supply chain (10%) and hardware (9%), the jobs that need more hands. Product management, the classic dream first job, is the hardest door of all: 0.3% of PM roles are junior, about 1 in 300.

If you're early in your career: more of these roles are at Y Combinator and seed-stage companies (6.2% and 5.4% junior) than at Series A startups (3.6%). Look early, and look at operations as a way in.

Finding 05Remote is a third of the market, and it doesn't pay less

34% of startup roles are remote. The share depends heavily on the work. Healthcare roles at startups are 59% remote. Customer success, marketing and data are above 40%. Hardware, where you need to be near the hardware, is just 7%.

The common worry about a remote pay cut doesn't show up here. Across US roles that list pay, the median remote role pays $193k, compared with $188k for on-site. Some of that may come down to which functions are remote, but the conclusion holds: choosing remote doesn't mean choosing less money.

Finding 06Only 3 in 10 US roles show pay, and the gap between functions is $125k

Despite pay-transparency laws in states like California, New York, Colorado and Washington, only 29.2% of US startup roles list a salary. Of those that do, 54.3% also mention equity.

When pay is listed, the function matters more than almost anything else. DevOps and AI roles top the chart with median midpoints of $225k and $220k. Support, admin and healthcare sit closer to $100k–$115k. The ranges themselves are wide: the median posting's range is 28.6% of its midpoint. So a “$170k–$230k” posting leaves real room to negotiate.

Pay climbs steeply with seniority, but the steepest step is the first one. The median junior role pays $113k, the median mid-level role $175k. After that, each step up adds $10k–$40k.

Finding 07One in three on-site roles is in the Bay Area or New York

Startup hiring is still very American. 58% of all roles are in the United States, with the UK (5.8%) and India (5.0%) a distant second and third. Most of the roles with no country listed are remote and open to people anywhere.

For on-site roles, geography matters even more. The San Francisco Bay Area alone has 22.9% of them and New York 10.2%, so together they have more on-site roles than the next ten cities combined. London and Bengaluru are the only cities outside the US with more than 2%.

Finding 08A few hundred companies do most of the hiring

Of the 4,746 startups we track, 3,082 were hiring this month. Hiring is very unevenly spread: the busiest 10% of companies posted 63.9% of all roles. The median hiring company had just 7 open roles, and 460 had exactly one.

That cuts both ways. The big hirers, mostly Series C and later with 40 to 50 open roles each, are where the volume is. A seed-stage company with one opening, though, is a much smaller pool to stand out in, and the hiring manager is often the founder.

Finding 09Good roles go fast, and stale ones linger

We watched 3,756 roles go up and come down again within the month. The median one was live for 6.6 days, and nearly a quarter were gone in under three. Roles come down when they're filled or put on hold, and at startups that happens fast.

At the same time, a lot of what's listed isn't fresh. When we first crawled every board, a third of open roles had been up for more than three months, and one in six for more than six. Some are evergreen (“always hiring engineers”). Others are forgotten.

The practical lesson is to apply in the first week. RoleRoo finds 93.3% of new roles within 24 hours of posting (median: 6.5 hours), which is the whole point of the product.

Finding 10Job seekers are aiming where startups aren't hiring

Since March 2024, people have run 28,197 resume reviews on FixMyResume, our sister product, each against a specific job. That gives us a rare view of the other side of the market: which roles job seekers are actually going for.

Put the two side by side and the mismatch is stark. 56% of job seekers are going for engineering roles, but engineering is 33% of startup hiring. Sales and customer success are the reverse: 23% of startup roles, but only 3% of what job seekers target. Finance is over-subscribed too (8% of seekers, 3% of roles), while product and design have twice as many roles, proportionally, as people aiming for them.

One caveat: FixMyResume's users aren't a perfect sample of all job seekers, and many are outside the US. But the gap is too large to be noise. And when people do apply, their resumes often aren't a close fit. The median match score against the job they targeted was 65 out of 100, and 29.9% scored under 50.

“If you can sell, there has rarely been a better time to join a funded startup. If you can only code, you're in the most crowded line.”

What this means if you're looking

• Move in the first week. Filled roles come down within days. Set alerts and check on Wednesdays, after the Tuesday peak.
• Show how you use AI, whatever your role. Most designers, PMs, sellers and CS managers are now expected to work with it. One concrete example on your resume beats a skills line.
• Consider go-to-market. Sales and customer success are a quarter of startup hiring and attract a fraction of the applicants.
• Early career? Look early-stage and in operations. That's where most of the junior roles are.
• Don't rule out remote over pay. The median remote role pays as much as the on-site one.
• Ask about pay early. 7 in 10 postings won't tell you, and the listed ranges are wide.

How we did this

Startups. 4,746 venture-backed companies from the Y Combinator directory, the portfolio job boards of 18 VC firms (including Sequoia, Accel, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, GV and Kleiner Perkins), and funding news. We read their own careers pages on Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable and Y Combinator, twice a day.

Roles. Every role open at any point from 11 October – 10 November 2026: 85,079 in total. Function and seniority are read from the job title with fixed rules, and a title with no level counts as mid-level. "Remote" means the employer marked it remote. Pay is the employer's own posted range: US roles, annual USD, hourly postings excluded. AI mentions were measured on the 20,173 roles whose full description we hold.

Timing. "New roles per week" counts only roles first seen at companies we were already tracking, so the first crawl's backlog doesn't inflate it. "Days live" covers roles that disappeared from the employer's board, not roles we archived to save space.

Job seekers. FixMyResume reviews are counted by the field of the job each resume was checked against, matched on keywords at the start of the job description. No individual resume or person is identifiable in this report.

We'll update this report every quarter. Questions or corrections: support@fixmyresume.xyz.