Ask HN: Are there actually any exciting companies in Seattle?

I'm considering moving jobs, but I cannot for the life of me find a company that has a product or mission that I can feel passionate about. It's either work for one of the behemoths, or work for a company that provides services to other tech companies.

Does anyone have any tips for places I should be looking into? A bit of background on myself: 5 years full-stack experience with a bend toward modern JS / webapp development. 1 year management experience.

Am I doomed to work for Amazon?

I would checkout http://www.ivysoftworks.com/. The CEO of this company was the CTO of a company I worked for. Extremely developer friendly, great visionary etc.

Checkout Intentional Software. It's a startup of about 70 people funded and led by billionaire CTO Charles Simonyi. They built a platform for developing domain-specific languages (on top of the CLR), and are now developing some pretty incredible collaborative productivity apps on top of that platform. Their recruiting slogan is "this is why you chose computer science," and after interning there for 6 months I can say that's 100% accurate.

Pay and benefits are equivalent to what you'd get at Microsoft or Amazon, without the corporate BS.

http://www.intentsoft.com/careers/

Any C++ positions without US citizenship requirement?

(Disclaimer: I work at Dato.)

Dato is a venture-funded startup in Fremont (right by the canal, down the street from Google). We are on a mission to make the power of machine learning accessible to the masses, with a great team and an exciting opportunity ahead of us. We maintain and contribute to open source projects. Personally, I think it's really exciting and I am passionate about it.

https://dato.com/company/careers/