Most startups never post on the big job sites, or they post late, after the founders have already worked through their own network. If you want to know how to find a job at a startup, the search runs on different channels: smaller boards, investor pages, founders posting on LinkedIn, and a short note sent straight to the team. Then comes the part most candidates skip, which is checking whether the company you found will still be paying salaries in eighteen months.
Where startups actually post their roles
Startup job boards
Startup job boards are the obvious first stop. Wellfound is one widely used example for international and US-based companies, and in France Welcome to the Jungle carries a lot of young companies alongside more established ones. Many cities also have local boards tied to a tech community or a regional startup hub. Use the filters for company size and stage when a board offers them, because "startup" on a listing can mean anything from four people in a flat to a 600-person scale-up.
Set up alerts on two or three boards rather than ten. You want to see a new role within a day or two of it going up, since small teams often close a process as soon as they meet one person they like.
Investor and accelerator portfolio pages
Many venture funds and accelerators run a jobs page that pulls together open roles across their portfolio companies. Few candidates use them. Pick five funds that invest in the sector you care about, bookmark their portfolio job boards and check them once a week. There is a bonus here: every company on that page has taken money from that investor, which tells you something before you even read the job description.
Founders and early employees on LinkedIn
At a twelve-person company, the hiring manager is often a founder, and the job post is often a LinkedIn update written in five minutes. "We're hiring our first salesperson, DM me" goes up on a Tuesday, collects a few hundred comments and is filled within two weeks. Follow the founders and early employees at companies you would want to join, and turn on notifications for the three or four you care about most. When they share something about their product, leave a comment with actual substance, so your name is familiar by the time you apply.
Approaching a small team directly
With startups, writing to the team when no role is posted is normal. A founder who will need a second engineer in three months would usually rather hear from you now than pay a recruiter later. Keep the note short: who you are in one line, one specific thing you noticed about their product or customers, and what you could take off their plate.
Something like this works:
Hi Clara, I run partnerships at a logistics software firm and saw that Kargo Labs just opened an office in Lyon. Your onboarding flow still asks carriers to email PDFs; I built the automated version of that process in my current job. If you're hiring for ops or partnerships in the next few months, I'd like to talk for fifteen minutes.
Every sentence in that note is about them or about a result. Send it to a founder or to the person who would manage you, not to a generic jobs@ address. If you hear nothing, one follow-up a week later is enough. A second follow-up rarely changes the answer and can cost you the goodwill you started with.
How to check a startup before you join
Joining a startup means betting part of your career on a company that might not exist in two years. You can't remove that risk, but you can see a lot of it from the outside using public signals. None of them proves anything on its own, so read them together.
Funding stage and date of the last round
Look up when the company last raised and roughly how much. Press releases, the company blog and startup databases usually carry this. A seed round closed three months ago and a Series A closed three years ago with no news since are very different situations. A long gap is not automatically bad, since some companies reach profitability and stop raising, but it is a question worth asking.
Team growth or shrinking on LinkedIn
The company's LinkedIn page shows headcount and, for many companies, how it has moved recently. Click through to the employee list. Are people joining in the last six months, or are the recent changes mostly departures? Several senior people leaving in the same quarter is something to ask about directly, and politely.
How long roles stay open
If the same role has been reposted for five months, something is off. The brief may be unclear, the pay may be low, or candidates keep turning the offer down. Note the posting date of each role you track and compare it with what the careers page shows.
Who the founders are
Read the founders' profiles. Have they built a company before, or spent years inside the industry they are selling to? Do they post about customers and the product, or mostly about fundraising? You are looking for people who understand the problem they are solving, and you are also checking whether you would want to work for them for the next three years.
Questions to ask about runway in the interview
Once you are in a process, raise the money questions early and calmly. Founders who are comfortable with their numbers usually answer them, and a vague answer tells you something too.
- How many months of runway do you have at the current burn rate?
- When do you plan to raise next, and what do you need to show before then?
- Are you generating revenue yet, and is it growing?
- What changed in the plan over the last six months?
On equity, ask in one line for the number of shares or options, the total shares outstanding and the vesting schedule, so the offer becomes something you can compare. Negotiating that package is its own step, covered in how to negotiate a job offer before you accept.
Getting your documents ready for a small team
The documents still matter, they just do different work. If you are coming from a large company, your CV needs to show ownership and range rather than titles, which is what reframing a corporate CV for a startup walks through. The letter shifts as well, and what changes in a cover letter for a startup explains how. If your LinkedIn profile is current, Postulit can turn it into a first CV draft that you then trim for each startup on your list.
A simple weekly routine
Pick ten startups you would genuinely join and put them in a spreadsheet with stage, date of the last round, headcount trend and one founder's name. Each week, check your board alerts and five portfolio pages, then send two short direct notes to companies on the list. Before any first interview, spend twenty minutes on the four checks above and write down the two runway questions you plan to ask.