16 Startups Hiring Techies Now, and the Top Salary Isn’t in Engineering
From nuclear batteries to tax-filing AI agents, plus one People Ops role at up to $380K.
Shield AI makes Hivemind, software that lets aircraft fly themselves, along with the V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft it runs on. You might expect the biggest paycheck in this week’s startup job roundup to go to someone teaching drones to think. It doesn’t. It goes to the person who will run Global People Operations.
The pay is up to $380K in Seattle. That beats a SOC engineer at Replit (up to $374K) and a Director of Product Management at Mixpanel (up to $373K). Nobody on the job description is asked to land a plane. They are asked to build a People function where most of the support is AI-enabled and self-service, which is a polite way of saying the employees will also be flying themselves.
We bring this up because People Ops has spent decades being called “non-technical,” usually by people who have never tried to roll out a benefits change across three time zones. It’s also one of the functions where women have long been well represented. So when it tops a list next to security engineers and product directors, we notice.
Here’s this week’s reading from the startup job market, sorted by the kind of person each role is looking for.
For the people people
Shield AI: Sr. Director, Global People Operations. Seattle, up to $380K. Dallas or San Diego, up to $320K. Same job, $60K apart. That says something about how much location still matters, and that something is “a lot.”
EliseAI: GTM Product Enablement Manager, Housing. NYC or Boston, up to $190K. EliseAI’s agents handle leasing, resident messages and maintenance requests. You’d be the first enablement hire, writing the training, demo scripts and certifications that help the sales team explain the product without saying “it’s basically magic.”
Black Ore: Customer Usage and Adoption Lead. NYC. Its Tax Autopilot uses AI agents to do tax prep for CPA firms. You’d be the first person in the role, owning onboarding, usage and renewals for every firm that signs. Accountants are famously relaxed about software changes, so it should be easy.
For those who can sell a thing before it fully exists
Elorian AI: Founding Enterprise GTM Lead. Palo Alto. A multimodal AI lab founded by ex-DeepMind researchers. Co-founder Andrew Dai was an engineering leader on Gemini. You’d be the first enterprise commercial leader, closing the biggest deals and writing pricing and the sales playbook from scratch. A blank page, but a well-funded one.
Blackbird: Product Marketing Manager. NYC, up to $175K. Loyalty and payments tools for restaurants and their guests. You’d build product marketing from the ground up for three audiences: diners, restaurant operators and the staff in between. Two of those three groups are reliably busy during lunch.
Atoms: Special Projects Director, Marketing. San Francisco. Atoms builds physical AI for food, mining and transport. This role focuses on its Otter restaurant software. “Special projects” is a title that usually means “you’ll know it when you see it,” and here it means activation, upsell and new partnerships.
Interfere: Founding Designer. NYC, up to $250K. Software that helps teams find broken product experiences and fix them. Founder Luke Shiels started it after one too many afternoons lost to bug hunting. You’d own everything from user interviews to shipped interfaces, which makes you the person who decides what “broken” means.
For those who like their work to weigh something
Zeno Power: Chief of Staff. Washington, DC, hybrid, up to $200K. Zeno makes nuclear batteries for remote places on Earth, in space and at sea. You’d work next to the CEO on priorities, investor materials and government partnerships. The batteries last for years, and we’re told the meetings don’t.
Mariana Minerals: Procurement Manager, Construction. SF or Houston, up to $180K plus equity. A software-first minerals company building supply for energy, AI and defense. You’d run procurement on its capital projects from bid package to closeout. If you’ve ever planned a wedding on budget, you have the transferable skills.
Senra Systems: three senior robotics engineers. Cypress, CA, up to $260K. Senra makes electrical wire harnesses for aerospace and defense. The roles cover data and perception, robotic cells and manipulation skills, that last one meaning teaching robots to handle floppy wire. Anyone who has untangled a drawer of chargers is already qualified to have opinions.
For those who would like to be left alone with a terminal
Replit: SOC Engineer. Up to $374K. Replit lets anyone build apps in plain English, which means it’s also the security team’s job to keep plain English from building anything alarming. You’d build its security data lake and own detection engineering.
Airbase: Infrastructure & DevSecOps Engineer. NYC or DC, up to $190K. Software for radio-frequency spectrum licensing. You’d secure the cloud, build the pipelines, and keep sensitive government data flows auditable. Invisible infrastructure for invisible airwaves.
Sekai: Senior Backend & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer. Remote-first. An AI platform for making, remixing and playing interactive mini apps. Python, Go, AWS, and the kind of traffic spikes that come with anything people describe as “fun.”
Parallel: basically everything. SF, Palo Alto, NYC, London. Web infrastructure for AI agents. They’re hiring in research, engineering, design, GTM, marketing, finance, legal and ops. If you’ve ever wanted to just send a résumé to a company with no particular role in mind, here’s your chance.
For the grown-ups in the room
Mixpanel: Director of Product Management. NYC, up to $373K total cash. More than 29,000 companies use its analytics. You’d lead the PMs behind the products that bring in the revenue, which is the job of deciding what everyone else will measure.
Thinking Machines: Researcher, Policy. San Francisco. A frontier lab training its own models and building Tinker. You’d set its policy research agenda on open-weight models and human-AI collaboration, and build relationships with think tanks. A rare research job where “I spent the afternoon talking” is a deliverable.
The part where we count
There are 16 companies on this list. Six of them didn’t publish a salary. Among the ones that did, the top three are $7K apart, and only one of them involves writing code.
The second thing to notice is how many first hires are not engineers. Elorian’s first enterprise lead, EliseAI’s first enablement manager, Black Ore’s first adoption lead, Interfere’s first designer. Whoever fills these roles decides how the company sells, teaches, onboards and looks. Those decisions outlast the org chart.
A note on the numbers, as always: “up to” is the most flexible phrase in compensation. Ask for the range early, and ask why Seattle is worth $60K more than San Diego.
After nine years and more than 550 events, we’ve watched plenty of brilliant women talk themselves out of roles because the title didn’t sound “technical enough.” This week, the best-paid job in the roundup is the one about people. Apply anyway. And if you’d like to meet the teams before you send the résumé, OutGeek events are free for job seekers, and no aircraft flies itself in the venue.