Startup Dev Jobs of The Week [22ndJune 2023]
50 software engineering jobs from high-quality startups backed by top VCs. Curated manually from 30+ job boards to ensure quality & freshness.
TLDR: "Hello world!" from our new newsletter! See this Airtable if you directly want to jump into the jobs curated for this week. Read on if you want to know more about why and how we curate them.
Many devs are struggling to find good, relevant job openings for the first time in their lives!
We are in the most challenging job market that most of us have seen in our lifetimes, particularly for software engineers and other tech roles.
There have been so many layoffs over the last few quarters that we currently have several trackers and a dedicated Techcrunch page for them. Most big-tech/ FAANG companies are not hiring aggressively anymore. Recruiter inbounds have slowed down considerably, even for the best of devs. And developers, particularly the ones who need a new job now, are struggling to figure out how to source and evaluate high-quality job opportunities.
Thankfully, many high-quality startups are still hiring, though perhaps not as many as during the pandemic boom. But boy, it's not easy to find them! Traditional job sites are too crowded and don't have the necessary filters to judge the quality of a prospective employer. Many growing startups also post on job boards that many devs usually don't visit, e.g., those of their VCs and niche dev-focused ones.
{Startups} && {Devs} is our attempt to help solve this problem.
Every week, we go through 30+ job boards, including those from 20 top VCs, to curate 50 high-quality software engineering jobs. Read on to learn more about how we source and curate these.
Which job boards do we curate from?
We reviewed more than 60 job boards to identify around half of them that regularly post high-quality startup engineering jobs. These include:
Most popular job sites like LinkedIn jobs, Glassdoor jobs, etc.
Job boards on the sites of 20 top-tier VCs for their portfolio companies, e.g., a16z, sequoia, etc.
Niche job sites and boards particularly focus on different segments of tech jobs, e.g., Wellfound (formerly Angellist) for early-stage jobs, boards run by tech influencers (example), remote-focused sites (example), etc.
Our weekly curation of 50 jobs comes from these sources. Also, we will keep this list updated to reflect the quality of their latest job posts.
How so we filter the jobs for “high quality”?
We use automated plus manual reviews on thousands of jobs posted on these jobs boards to select jobs that pass four different sets of filters:
Funding from a top-tier VC:
There are 1200+ (!! yes! the number surprised us, too!) active VCs in India and the US listed on Crunchbase. While what is top-tier among them can be very subjective, we include the top 50-60 (~5%) of them by market reputation, successful exits, and size & number of funds.
At least one round from one of these VCs is still the gold standard of funding validation among startups. Most of them have rigorous diligence processes (at least, ahem, most of the time). And by and large, funding by one of them is one of the best publicly available proxies of a start-up’s potential.
To be sure, many companies not funded by these VCs are absolutely killing it! But unfortunately, we do not have access to their private data. So it’s not possible for us to evaluate them meaningfully.
Company Glassdoor rating of 4+
This is perhaps the best publicly available proxy of a company’s internal culture. Sure - many times, companies try to hack it by “encouraging” people to post favorable reviews. But as a lot of companies’ recent slide in ratings tell us - your real culture will eventually catch up to your rating.
Top quartile team-size growth for their segment and company size over the last two years
This data, available on LinkedIn Premium, is an indicator of a company’s business growth.
Generally, growth expectations have been tempered over the last few quarters. Many high-quality companies have chosen to reduce their team size a bit, often by closing specific divisions/ teams. We consider this data in the context of a company’s industry and size and try to find top-of-the-segment growth.
Job posted to a new platform in the last week.
This indicates that the recruiters are still actively looking for candidates, i.e., the posting will likely be “fresh.”
Note: None of these indicators are perfect. But in our team’s collective experience of a few decades across startups, these are the best proxies we can think of to judge an opening’s quality from the perspective of prospective teammates. Some companies that don’t fit this filter can still be great places to work. But the ones who pass these are statistically much more likely to be good.
We also include relevant data from multiple sources for each job post.
For all the jobs posted, we also bring together multiple data points from across platforms to help you identify the right opportunities just right for you. These include:
Funding information from CrunchBase
total equity funding raised, date and stage of the last funding, major investors
Team size and growth information from Linkedin
Total team size, engineering team size (this can be important if you care about the sizes of the teams you want to join)
% team growth over the last 6, 12, and 24 months
Rating from Glassdoor
Skill-related information summarized from the job posts
We personally read through the job posts, try to identify the skills mentioned, and summarize them.
What software engineering jobs do we include?
Currently, we include frontend, backend, and full-stack roles. We try to ensure a healthy balance between these roles and across experience levels.
Also, we currently cover jobs in the US and India, across remote, hybrid, and in-person roles.
Jobs This Week
For our first issue, we are excited to present 50 jobs that match the quality criteria mentioned in the previous section. These include:
21 Backend, 13 Frontend, and 16 Fullstack roles (Full-stack seem to be getting hot now, particularly for lower experience levels!)
12 remote and 6 hybrid roles
Experience level: 20 with less than 2 years (or no specified level), 20 with 3-6 years, 10 with 6+ years of experience
We have set up all the data for you in this Airtable, so you can group/ filter/ copy/ download the data freely.
That’s all for our opening act! See you again next week… (Please! Pretty please? 🥺)
Have suggestions for the newsletter or a role we should feature? Email us at startupsanddevs@kombai.io