Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

Halfpricesoft | Founding Engineer | Berkeley, CA | ONSITE | $175k - $210k + Equity

Halfpricesoft has quietly dominated the small business payroll and tax compliance space for 20 years. We are a profitable, bootstrapped company with thousands of customers and a massive track record of stability.

We are entering a new era and transitioning our proven legacy solutions into a modern, cloud-native suite. We are looking for a Founding Engineer to serve as our technical partner in this expansion. You will report directly to the Founder, own the technical roadmap, and help build the team.

The Role:

Architect & Build: Lead the transition from legacy systems to a modern cloud architecture.

Infrastructure: Manage and scale our Kubernetes deployment.

Leadership: Set hiring standards and mentor future engineers.

Tech Stack: Python (Django), React, Kubernetes, Cloud-native.

Why join?

Real Impact: You aren't a cog in the machine; you are building the machine.

Stability + Upside: Competitive salary plus a Phantom Stock Plan with a transparent, revenue-based valuation formula (no VC dilution).

Autonomy: High-level ownership over the tech stack and product direction.

Apply here: https://www.halfpricesoft.com/career/founding-engineer/

Songscription | Founding Fullstack Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Onsite

At Songscription, we train state-of-the-art AI models to automate music transcription, with the vision of enabling any musician to learn any song, on any instrument, at any difficulty level. We recently raised a $5M funding round to make this possible. (Press release here: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/songscription-raises-...)

We’re looking for a cracked engineer with a passion for music to join our small, SF-based team and help us build out our consumer product (https://songscription.ai). If you or someone you know wants to work at the intersection of music, AI, and education at a fast-growing startup, please reach out to the co-founders directly at katie (at) songscription (dot) ai or alex (at) songscription (dot) ai.

Full JD here: https://songscription.ai/careers/founding-fullstack-engineer

Other positions available: Part-time designer, content creator, and a marketing lead.

Tailscale | Developer Advocates + many others | REMOTE (US, CA, UK)

Full JD here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/tailscale/jobs/4656023005

Tailscale is modernizing the way we connect our devices and services together and building a connectivity platform. We are rapidly growing across almost all areas of the business right now and that includes DevRel. The linked role is a video heavy one, but we're also looking for a Social Media Manager / Video Editor. We'll also soon be looking for a DevRel Engineer too.

There are dozens of other positions available too across Eng, Sales, and the whole company - see them all at https://tailscale.com/careers#open-job-positions

Socket | Staff/Senior Software Engineer | REMOTE (US)

Socket is a developer-first, security company focused on protecting the open-source supply chain. With over 90% of modern code coming from open source, Socket is tackling one of the most urgent and complex problems in security by building something that is both preventative and predictive.

Our product is trusted by 10,000+ organizations, including teams at Anthropic, Vercel, Salesforce, and OpenAI.

We are looking for Staff and Senior Level Software Engineers to join our team. You can find more details here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/socket/c1625d37-2c92-4455-8d3a-5ed3...

If you’re interested, email your resume to camilla@socket.dev with the subject line “HN – Socket Engineering”

Northstar Security | Software Engineer | SF Bay Area | Onsite | Full-time Northstar is a seed-stage cybersecurity startup building an agentic platform to help security teams understand and defend the complex environments they're responsible for. Our semantic layer integrates data from the fragmented security and IT tools that teams have to deal with and allows for an AI-native approach to reasoning over a company's security posture.

We're looking for someone with hands on experience building modern AI systems who wants to join an early startup (I'm also looking for someone who's a scrappy ui engineer/designer hybrid - will want to see examples of interesting UIs you've built and how you're using AI to accelerate the design process.

Contact me if you're interested - alex@northstar.security