Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)

Shield AI's mission is to protect service members and civilians by creating intelligent systems.

My team needs a manager, its a very well positioned team at a rapidly growing company working with some really awesome people. Any autonomy or robotics experience is a huge plus https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/7952271c-8578-42d8-a587-4707c...

Contact info on my profile if you have any questions I'm happy to chat!

We are looking for candidates that are excited to join us on a mission to raise the standard of trust online. All of our roles are fully-remote, except where specific locations are noted.

Most of the software engineering positions have been repeating here for years because we've been continually hiring for them, scaling our whole team to now over 300 people—many of those hires have come through Hacker News. We've been improving our hiring process over time, and we know some good candidates may have fallen through the cracks. Some people who tried in the past have had success going through it again, and we still pay for hiring projects.

Senior Backend Engineer - $178,500 USD + equity https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/abb953ee-5bb7-4637-9f6...

Senior Software Engineer, Windows Desktop App - $178,500 USD + equity — https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/47e569c6-f995-4955-a89...

Engineering Director, Browser Platform - $243,800 USD + equity https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/0541f1f3-4302-4b76-93a...

VP, Business Development - $320,000 USD + equity https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/276ae352-55b5-4fb2-9b9...

Director, Product Management - - $243,800 USD + equity https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/2a379a3e-ee10-45d2-927...

https://duckduckgo.com/careers

Spruce lets users control their data across the web. Instead of users logging into platforms, we believe platforms should request to access data vaults controlled by users.

The demand for trusted digital ID is accelerating as AI deepfakes begin to destroy most of the ways we use to verify identity today. How private or secure is it to hold your driver's license or passport up to a webcam to get a bank account? Was it ever private or secure? Stable diffusion can break so much of this already. Society will need trusted digital IDs and credentials. Our mission is to allow them to be controlled by individuals, with safeguards to prevent descents into surveillance states and checkpoint societies.

We are the main implementers of category-defining initiatives such as the digital ID program for the California DMV, and the verifiable digital credentials program in Utah. We are private sector participants in NIST's National Cyber Security of Excellence initiative for privacy-preserving digital ID.

We are hiring skilled engineers who care about making a real impact in improving public services, digital autonomy, and user privacy for the world. We work closely with public sector agencies, and have high regard for public servants. We have a strong engineering and customer-oriented culture, and are not simply a SaaS product or AI wrapper. Our roles are not for the faint of heart: you will be expected to work hard and learn a lot in this role.

Our engineers are ambitious to get outcomes for our customers and their constituents. On any given day, they may write great Rust/C#/TypeScript, deal with mainframe dumps, read policy documents, respond to technical RFIs/RFPs, manage on-prem environments, implement new NFC + Bluetooth protocols in Swift/Kotlin, create CI/CD processes that enforce W3C accessibility guidelines and i18n requirements, rewrite lost specs from disassembled binaries, figure out stablecoin payments, and design new protections for public key infrastructure. It is a team effort, and people with T-shirt shaped skills are able to collaborate and learn a ton from each other every day.

We are interested in candidates who want to be proud of the meaningful impact they make for society, even if it takes time to get right. This is not the right job for someone who wants to "join a cool new AI startup" that implodes or exits in under a year.

See our roles here: https://jobs.lever.co/sprucesystems/

We're on a mission to simplify running through wearables data. We're a small team of runners who love to build.

We're looking for a founding engineer to shape the future of our product and company. You’ll work across the stack–from building reliable, scalable systems to rapidly prototyping and launching new user-facing features. You’ll have significant ownership and influence on architecture, product direction, and engineering culture.

Ideally you love a few of the following: - Foundation ML models in the sensory space - Chat agents - Novel data visualizations - Recommendation systems - Operations research - Unique UX

https://getfast.ai/jobs

Saildrone is the world's leading collector of ocean-related in situ data via uncrewed vehicle, above and below the sea surface. We work with navies across the world to deliver insights about waterways, contribute to safety of life at sea, and mitigate illegal fishing and trafficking. Additionally, we work with governments, civic agencies, foundations, universities, and private companies around the globe to derive better information about our oceans and seas - be it sailing drones into the eye of hurricanes to obtain new scientific storm data, mapping out the ocean floor, collecting new CO2 data in hard-to-reach areas, or counting biomass to establish fishing quotas.

Maybe you saw that we've repeatedly hucked drones into category 4 hurricanes[1]. Or maybe that we completed a transoceanic cable survey for Meta[2]. And maybe you saw that we just announced a large partnership with Lockheed Martin[3]. Or maybe you didn't see any of that, but you're still intrigued by the idea of autonomous, long endurance sailboats that help us better understand and secure our planet.

Whatever the case, we're hiring for a breadth of different positions across our organization. In software, we're hiring for folks in our Perception, Platform, Frontend, and Vehicle teams. Stacks vary from team to team, but we're looking primarily for folks with backgrounds in C++, Python, and/or JavaScript (Node, TypeScript, React). All software positions are hybrid roles based out of Alameda, just a quick ferry ride across the Bay from San Francisco.

In addition to software engineers, we're also hiring for a bunch of other positions across the company in production/manufacturing, technical operations, and more.

You can see a list of open positions on our career page: https://www.saildrone.com/careers

Please apply through our career page; be sure to select "Other" and specify this HN post when asked how you heard about us!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28715110

[2]: https://www.saildrone.com/news/revolutionizing-deep-water-ca...

[3]: https://www.saildrone.com/media-room/press-releases/lockheed...