AI Startup Jobs: Who Is Hiring, Counted From Their Boards

AI startup jobs are plentiful but mostly experienced roles. On 10 November 2026, the job boards of 18 AI startups listed 1,781 openings between them. 984 had a non technical title, mostly sales and customer roles, 313 were remote, and only 34 were internships or new graduate roles, about 1.9 percent of the total.

On this page: 1,781 openings counted on 18 AI startups’ own boards on 10 November 2026, split into technical and non technical titles, remote, India and entry level, with pay exactly as postings list it and a cross check against the getAIwork board’s own screening.

How many jobs do AI startups have open right now?

Most pages ranking for this search are aggregators. They show you a wall of listings and a big total, and they rarely say which companies they counted or when. So we picked a list and went to the source. On 10 November 2026 we read the public job boards of 18 AI startups by script: 17 through the public job posting API that Ashby documents and Figure AI through its Greenhouse board. Every number below comes from those boards, read on that day.

The rule for the list was simple and you can repeat it: well known, privately held AI companies whose own boards answered a plain request that morning. We left out OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Scale AI and Databricks because each is far larger than the rest and would swamp the count; this site covers them separately, starting with our guide to OpenAI careers and its contractor routes. Mistral, Glean and Hugging Face did not answer on either board system, so they are not here.

Startup (own board)	Openings	Technical titles	Non technical titles	Remote	Intern or new grad	Pay printed
Harvey	376	150	226	23	2	266
Sierra	214	95	119	24	8	189
Perplexity	136	68	68	0	6	115
Decagon	130	58	72	10	2	123
ElevenLabs	128	39	89	106	0	1
Cohere	127	66	61	84	3	93
Cognition	111	42	69	8	0	9
Figure AI	103	62	41	0	12	58
Baseten	102	50	52	2	0	97
Cursor	95	32	63	44	0	0
Lovable	79	37	42	1	0	15
Writer	46	20	26	1	0	36
Modal	44	27	17	1	1	41
Replit	31	21	10	1	0	28
Abridge	27	7	20	4	0	27
Midjourney	16	9	7	1	0	8
Character.AI	13	11	2	0	0	13
Runway	3	3	0	3	0	0
All 18	1,781	797	984	313	34	1,119

A title rule decides technical or not: engineer, scientist, researcher, developer, machine learning, infrastructure, hardware and similar words count as technical, and everything else does not. It is blunt, but it is the same rule for every company, which is more than a keyword search box offers. One caution on posting ages: 616 of the 1,781 were published or republished in the 30 days before we counted, and all 46 of Writer’s carried a recent date, which looks like a bulk refresh rather than 46 new jobs.

Are most AI startup jobs in engineering?

No. More than half are not. Of the 1,781 openings, 984 had a non technical title, which is 55 percent. Harvey, the legal AI company, had 117 roles in its Go to Market department alone. Cursor, which sells a coding tool, had 63 non technical titles out of 95, with sales the biggest single department at 29. A coding startup hiring mostly people who do not code sounds like a joke, but it is just what a company does once the product works and somebody has to sell it.

This matches the one number on page one of the search results that comes from data. fastaijobs, an aggregator, reported in its own analysis that nearly half of the AI startup listings it tracks sit outside engineering departments. Our figure is a little higher because we classify by title, not department, so a sales engineer counts as technical for us and a solutions role on a revenue team may not.

The catch is seniority. Most non technical roles here are account executives, sales directors, customer success managers and recruiters, and they ask for years of the same work elsewhere. Our count of AI sales jobs and how many are junior shows how thin the entry rung is even in sales. If you are unsure which family fits your background, the AI jobs match quiz gives you a shortlist in about a minute.

How many AI startup jobs take people with no experience?

Very few. By title, 34 of the 1,781 openings were internships or new graduate roles, about 1.9 percent. Figure AI had 12, nine of them engineering internships at its San Jose site. Sierra had 8 and Perplexity 6. Twelve of the 18 startups had none at all, including ElevenLabs, Cursor and Cognition. And 29 of the 34 were technical: software, research or hardware.

fastaijobs found much the same thinness across a far bigger set. Its August 2026 report counted 325 entry level roles out of 28,414 deduplicated postings, 1.1 percent, and its May run had found 458 out of 35,450, or 1.3 percent. Those are its own figures, which we could not check against its raw data. Whichever count you trust, the answer is the same: these companies mostly hire people who have already done the job.

Where entry roles do print pay, it is high, and it comes with a tight bar. These are the startups’ own figures as listed on 10 November 2026. A listed range is not an offer, pay depends on location and level, and nothing here is a promise of a job or of pay.

Posting (own board)	Where	Pay as listed on 10 November 2026
Harvey, Software Engineer, New Grad (2027)	San Francisco and New York	$165,000 to $181,500 a year
Sierra, Software Engineer, Agent (New Grad 2027)	San Francisco	$150,000 to $180,000 a year
Decagon, Member of Technical Staff, New Grad (2027 Start)	San Francisco	$185,000 a year
Perplexity, Member of Technical Staff, AI Products (Early Career)	San Francisco	$180,000 to $270,000 a year
Decagon, Engineering Intern (Summer 2027)	San Francisco	$3,000 a week
Modal, ML Research Intern	New York	$15,000 a month

Which AI startup jobs suit someone without a tech background?

This is the part the aggregators skip. Two startups on our list post contract work that a careful non engineer could realistically read for. Cohere had five Data Annotation Specialist contracts in a department it calls Data Quality (Contract), all remote. Its Safety contract, posted 3 November 2026, asks for at least 16 hours a week at 45 CAD or 40 USD an hour as listed, open in Canada or the United States, and warns that the work includes explicit content. Its German writer and translator contract lists 30 CAD an hour and is open in Canada only. ElevenLabs had five freelance roles, among them Audiobook Specialists, dubbing, subtitling and translation, based in the United Kingdom and Germany.

Read the requirements before you get excited. The Generalist contract asks for a year or more in annotation, model evaluation, content moderation or research. That is lighter than a sales director role, not nothing.

Here is the cross check only this site can run. Our free work board held 1,929 live listings on 10 November 2026, and its stats.json, updated 9 November 2026, rated 295 of them beginner level. Crawled that morning, the board carried 39 listings from nine of these 18 startups. Six were rated beginner by our screening: five Cohere annotation contracts, two of them showing the same CA$30 and CA$45 an hour as Cohere’s own posts, plus one ElevenLabs freelance role. That is 15 percent of their listings on our board, against 1.9 percent entry roles on the startups’ boards, because the board also screens contract work, not just staff jobs. Our Cohere careers guide covers its contract route in more detail.

Can you work remotely or from India for an AI startup?

Remote, sometimes. 313 of the 1,781 openings, about 18 percent, were remote. It depends almost entirely on the company. ElevenLabs marked 106 of its 128 roles remote and Cohere 84 of 127, while Perplexity and Figure AI listed none. Harvey, the biggest board here, had 23 remote roles out of 376.

India is thinner still. Only 18 openings named an Indian location. Harvey had 9 in Bengaluru, mostly senior backend engineering plus one enterprise sales manager. Cursor posted 4 Bengaluru roles on 9 November 2026, including a forward deployed engineer and a solutions architect. Cognition had 3, among them a QA engineer and a sales vice president, and ElevenLabs had 2, both in sales. None of the 18 was an internship. Readers in India looking for a first role will find more on our list of AI jobs open to freshers in India than on these boards.

What do people applying to AI startups report?

We read three Reddit threads in full from August and September 2026, plus the titles of about a dozen more. They are accounts, not evidence, and two of the three are about people pretending to be AI companies rather than the companies themselves.

In a September 2026 r/csMajors thread, a master’s student with an AI engineering internship described a ten minute screen for a founding engineer role at a startup of two to ten people, then a rejection a few hours later. The commenters’ reading was blunt: a founding role that asks for a year of experience is not an entry level role, whatever the posting says, and asking about visa sponsorship at that size is a hard sell.

In an August 2026 r/jobsearchhacks thread, a poster described a WhatsApp recruiter using Cohere’s name to offer app optimization tasks, paid in crypto, that required topping up an account with the worker’s own money to continue. Nothing like it appears on Cohere’s own board, and commenters recognised it as an old task scheme with an AI coat of paint. In a September 2026 r/csMajors thread, another poster said a fake recruiter on a video call asked them to clone and install a code repository, which commenters then found was built to steal keys and passwords from the machine.

Where the accounts agree with the boards is the bar. Real startups ask for experience even on junior looking titles, and the easy, well paid offer that arrives by message is the one to doubt.

How do you tell a real AI startup job from a fake one?

Start from the company’s own board. Every real opening in this article sits on a board the company links from its website, and the application runs through that board. No real startup here asks you to buy a training kit, deposit money or move to Telegram to get started. A Telegram recruiter hiring for a famous AI lab is about as likely to be real as a course whose certificate no employer has ever asked for.

The Federal Trade Commission’s job scams guidance warns never to pay for the promise of a job, and that is the test that matters. If an offer asks you to pay, send crypto or install software before you have spoken to anyone at the company, stop and check the company’s own board instead. For safer first steps that do not ask for a degree, our explainer on RLHF jobs and who hires for them covers the training platforms, and the match quiz for AI jobs that need no experience points you to listings you can apply for today.

Frequently asked questions

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Platform statuses and listed pay change without notice. Pay figures are quoted only as listed by the poster on the date shown and are never a promise of earnings. This page was verified on the date shown and is rechecked on the weekly refresh.