Where do startups actually post their jobs?
On their own applicant tracking system first, usually Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, which publishes straight to their careers page. Some roles then reach Y Combinator's Work at a Startup, Wellfound, an investor's talent page or the monthly Hacker News hiring thread. Plenty of small startups never post to LinkedIn at all.
The careers page is the source of record
A startup writes the job in its applicant tracking system, and that system publishes the careers page automatically. Everything else is downstream of that one action.
So the careers page is not a marketing copy of the listing. It is the listing. If a role exists anywhere, it exists there, usually before it exists anywhere else.
The places worth checking beyond the company site
- Work at a Startup, run by Y Combinator, covering companies it has funded.
- Wellfound, formerly AngelList Talent, which skews early stage.
- Investor talent pages. Most large funds run a jobs board for their portfolio, and it is a fast way to find companies you had not heard of.
- The Hacker News hiring thread, posted on the first weekday of each month, where the person writing the post is often the person doing the hiring.
- Welcome to the Jungle, which absorbed Otta, for European and US tech roles.
- Vertical boards for your field, which are usually smaller and better targeted than anything general.
Why small startups skip the big boards
Cost and volume. LinkedIn allows one free listing at a time and charges for anything beyond that, which is a real decision for a company hiring two people a year.
The bigger deterrent is what a wide posting brings in. A ten-person company that puts a role on every aggregator gets hundreds of applications and nobody whose job it is to read them. Many deliberately keep the posting narrow.
What this means for how you search
Work from companies to roles, not the other way round. Pick thirty startups you would actually join, find each careers page, and watch those.
The method is unglamorous and it works. The cost is that checking thirty pages by hand every week is tedious enough that most people stop after two weeks.
How we do it
We monitor the Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby boards of a curated list of companies directly, so a startup role reaches you at the point it is published rather than after it syndicates. Postings are matched against your CV on meaning, so an unfamiliar startup title still surfaces.
Updated 2026-09-06