A Satellite Company Needs a Graphic Designer, and Other Things Nobody Tells You About Tech Hiring
Somewhere in Los Angeles, a company that manufactures the bodies of satellites is looking for someone to make its slides look nice.
Sit with that for a moment. Apex Space builds what the industry calls satellite buses, a term that sounds like a transit initiative for Mars. It sells them to governments and commercial buyers, in proposals that presumably run long and cost a great deal to lose. And at some point, one imagines, a person in a very serious meeting looked at a very serious document and asked, softly, whether anything could be done about the font.
Now there is a job. It pays up to $100K, and it does not require you to know what a satellite bus is, although you will be expected to stop giggling.
If you have spent any time at a women-in-tech event, you know the sentence that hangs around the coat check: "Oh, I'm not really technical." It is usually delivered by someone who has just explained, in detail, how she runs a department. So here is this month's reading from the startup job market, sorted by the only question that matters: what kind of person are you pretending not to be?
For those who have been told they aren't technical
- Apex Space: Graphic Designer, Business Development. Los Angeles, up to $100K. See above. You'd design the proposals and presentations that chase contracts around the world. Giggling to be phased out by your second week.
- Mirendil: Founding Finance. San Francisco, up to $350K. A frontier AI lab that trains its own models and has only just started sending invoices to enterprise customers. You'd be its first finance person, handling cash, planning, billing and the delightful question of how one finances compute. The official title is Member of Technical Staff, so congratulations: you're technical now.
- Rillet: Strategic Partnerships Lead, UK. London. Finance software for modern teams, with more than 600 customers. You'd be the first person responsible for finding it British friends, among accounting firms, investors and tech companies.
- Raspberry AI: Enablement Lead. New York. AI for fashion and retail, founded by Cheryl Liu and used by SKIMS, Fabletics and Walmart. You'd build the team function that gets solution engineers and implementation specialists from the demo to the part where customers actually use the thing.
- Othello: Founding AE, Founding BD, Senior Account Manager. New York. Othello coaches salespeople in real time, during live calls. A small voice in your ear offering guidance mid-sentence is something many of us have wished upon certain colleagues.
For those who like their work to weigh something
- Radiant: Senior Build Engineer, Turbomachinery. El Segundo, up to $219K. Radiant is mass-producing small nuclear reactors you can move around, with Army, Navy and Air Force contracts to its name. You'd lead the hands-on assembly of the turbomachinery. This is not a role for people who enjoy saying "let's just ship it and see."
- Anduril: Senior Supplier Industrialization Engineer, Composite Structures. Remote US, up to $212K. The defense company needs someone to own its composites supply base, vetting the suppliers of wings, airframe skins and radomes. A job title that long has earned the right to work from home.
- Base Power: Backend Software Engineer. Austin. A network of home batteries with designs on replacing the centralized grid. You'd write the Go services that let utilities run the fleet. Technically it's a software job. Spiritually, it's a dispute with the power company.
For those who would like to be left alone with their code
- Phantom: Backend Software Engineer, Trading. Remote, up to $250K. A self-custody crypto wallet with tens of millions of users. You'd build the APIs and pipelines behind its trading products, for people who check prices the way others check on sleeping infants.
- General Translation: Software Engineer. San Francisco. Open-source tools that help companies launch in dozens of languages, for customers including Cursor and ClickHouse. It's TypeScript, on-site, and a rare chance to work on the problem of being understood.
- Othello: Solutions Engineer, Senior Full-Stack Engineer. New York or Tel Aviv. Same voice in the ear, different side of the wiring.
- Braintrust: GTM Engineer. San Francisco. Braintrust helps teams at Notion, Stripe and OpenAI see what their AI agents are up to, which is more than most of us can say. You'd build the agents and internal tools that sales and marketing use daily, and thereby become very popular or very blamed.
- OpenAI: Founding Full-Stack Engineer. San Francisco. Building products for consultants. The word "founding" is doing some cardio here, given the employer. To apply, reply to Tobias Büschel's post or send him a DM, the modern equivalent of slipping a note under the door.
For the grown-ups in the room
- SentiLink: Director of Security & Risk. Remote US. SentiLink checks more than three million identities a day and works with 13 of the 15 largest US banks. You'd run its FedRAMP, SOC 2 and PCI DSS programs, a job that consists mostly of acronyms and being right.
- Databricks: Evergreen Solutions Architect. Tokyo. You'd steer customers' data and AI platforms from architecture through production. We don't know what makes the role evergreen. We assume it doesn't shed.
The part where we count
Of the eight founders personally doing the hiring on this list, one is a woman. Cheryl Liu, please enjoy the conference panel invitations that are surely already on their way!
The other thing to notice is where the jobs are. Reactors, batteries, defense, models, the plumbing beneath the models. Between 2018 and 2022, our events drew eight to twelve hiring teams each. Now it's closer to four. Tech hiring hasn't vanished so much as moved into a smaller, louder building, and the people inside it mostly already know each other.
That is why the first-hire roles deserve a second look. The first finance person decides how the money gets counted. The first partnerships lead decides who gets a call back. Whoever arrives first writes the rules that everyone later describes as "just how we do things." A word of caution on those salaries, though: "up to" remains the most elastic phrase in compensation, so ask for the range and ask for it early.
After nine years and more than 550 events, we have one piece of advice about the sentence at the coat check. Retire it. Somewhere, a company building nuclear reactors needs someone who understands supply chains, and a company building satellites needs someone who understands fonts.
Apply to the one that scares you slightly. And if you'd rather meet the people before you send the resume, OutGeek events are free for job seekers and come with considerably fewer turbines.