Last week I picked ten funded startups and looked at what each one was hiring for.
This week I wanted the bigger picture. So I took every open role at every funded startup Adamlead tracks, and sorted them by job.
First, an honest note about the data.
Cleaning it up first
Adamlead reads the careers pages of the startups it tracks. As of October 24, that gave 775 job links across 60 funded startups.
Not all of them were jobs. Careers pages are messy, and the scraper also picked up things like "Read more", "Back to jobs", "E-Verify Notice" and a few template placeholders. I took those out by hand.
That leaves 709 real roles at 43 startups.
One more thing: Adamlead reads up to 40 roles per company. Five companies hit that cap (Hark, Temporal, Mercor, Mytra and Whop), so they're hiring at least that many, probably more.
The breakdown
Here's what the 709 roles are, by function:
- Engineering: 342 (48%)
- Sales: 140 (20%)
- Operations, finance, legal and people: 89 (13%)
- Product and design: 53 (7%)
- Marketing: 37 (5%)
- Customer success and solutions: 26 (4%)
- Healthcare roles: 9 (1%), 7 of them at Nourish ("Talk to a dietitian covered by your insurance").
- Research: 8 (1%)
Almost half is engineering, which is no surprise. One in five is sales, which is more than I expected. Marketing is small: 37 roles across all 43 companies.
And it's moving fast. 278 of the 709 roles were first seen in the last week, since October 17.
Engineering: 342 roles
40 of the 43 startups are hiring engineers. The most:
- Hark: 34 engineering roles (Series A, San Jose, "Computers are now capable of thinking.")
- Mytra: 31 (Series C, industrial robots and software)
- Mercor: 24 (Series C, San Francisco)
- Temporal: 18 (Series E, Bellevue)
- Prime Intellect: 17 (Series A, San Francisco, 11-50 people)
Two titles kept coming up.
"Member of Technical Staff" appears 35 times, at seven companies: Prime Intellect (10), Hark (8), Sycamore (7), Whop (4), TextQL (3), Basis (2) and Judgment Labs (1). You mostly see it at AI labs. Here it also shows up at Whop and Basis, which aren't labs at all.
"Forward deployed engineer" appears 9 times, at eight companies: Prime Intellect, Gradial, TextQL, Greptile, Monumental, Nous Research, Sycamore and Whop. That's an engineer who works inside the customer's company to get the product running. One TextQL listing is titled "Ex-Palantir FDE NYC Senior $305K+", which tells you where the idea comes from and what it pays.
If you're an engineer looking for a job: AI startups want people who can build and also sit with a customer.
Sales: 140 roles
29 of the 43 are hiring in sales. The most:
- Temporal: 15
- Basis: 14 (Series B, "The next era of accounting")
- Whop: 14, including country managers for Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Germany
- Braintrust: 11 (Series B, "Ship quality AI at scale")
- Aegis AI: 11 (Series A, 11-50 people)
- Torq: 10 (Series D, security)
Account executive is the most common sales title, with 42 openings at 12 companies. Temporal, Braintrust and Aegis AI are hiring 8 each.
Eight account executives at once isn't filling a seat. It's building a sales team. And a new sales team needs a CRM, contact data, call tools, onboarding and someone to train them.
Operations, finance, legal and people: 89 roles
This is the group I'd watch if you sell software to finance teams.
31 roles are in finance, accounting, tax or audit. Basis and Whop have 5 each. Whop alone is hiring a director of technical accounting, two indirect tax leads (US and international) and a finance systems engineer.
When a startup hires a controller, it's usually because the founder has stopped being able to do the books on a Sunday. That's when finance software gets bought.
Where the jobs are
537 of the 709 roles say where they are, in the listing or the title. Of those:
- San Francisco Bay Area: 261 (about half)
- New York: 117
- Remote: 49
- London: 18
- Berlin: 16
- Seattle area: 9
- Everywhere else: 67, from Chicago and Austin to Colombia and Germany
Remote is rare. Only 49 of the 537, under one in ten. Most funded startups want you in the room, and most of the rooms are in San Francisco and New York.
The newest roles
278 roles appeared in the week to October 24. Engineering was 110 of them, sales 64, operations and finance 41, product and design 26.
Sales is a bigger share of the new roles (23%) than of all of them (20%). It's one week of data, so I wouldn't read much into it yet. I'll check again next month.
Small teams are hiring too
21 of the 43 have 50 people or fewer, and together they have 245 open roles.
Prime Intellect (27 roles), Aegis AI (26) and Sycamore (24) each have 11-50 people. For them, every hire is a meaningful share of the company, and the founders are probably still doing a lot of the interviewing themselves.
What the stages say
By funding stage, the roles break down like this:
- Series B: 192
- Series A: 160
- Series C: 128
- Seed: 104
- Series D: 77
- Series E: 41
- Other venture rounds: 7
Series A and B companies have about half of all the open roles. That's the stage where a startup goes from "the founders do everything" to "we need a team for that".
If you're job hunting
- Look at the round date. A startup that raised a few weeks ago has budget for the roles it lists, and moves fast.
- Apply to the small ones. At 11-50 people your work is visible, and the person reading your application may be a founder.
- Learn what "forward deployed" means. It's showing up more, and it pays well.
If you sell to startups
Hiring tells you what a company is about to need.
- Lots of account executives? They need sales tools and data.
- A controller or tax lead? Finance and accounting software.
- Forward deployed engineers? They're selling to big customers, which means security reviews, contracts and compliance.
- Their first marketer? Content, design and ads.
Every company above has a page on Adamlead with its funding, its open roles and contacts where we have them. The full list of funded startups hiring right now is here: Jobs at funded startups.
What role are you hiring for, or hoping to get hired for?
Data as of October 24, 2026, from the careers pages Adamlead reads (up to 40 roles per company). I sorted the roles into functions by their titles, so a few could reasonably sit in a different group. Company descriptions are each company's own.