Where startup engineering jobs are in 2026: SF, New York, and remote

Ask where startup engineering happens in 2026 and you get vibes. Here is the count instead. The roles.cc board lists every live engineering role at the venture-backed startups we track, taken from the companies' own job sites. On June 11, 2026 that is 2,635 open roles across 446 companies. The split tells a clear story.

San Francisco is not back. It never left.

Two of every five startup engineering roles in the country sit in one metro. The AI cycle concentrated capital in the Bay Area harder than any cycle since the late 90s, and engineering headcount follows the money within months, a pattern you can watch on our recent raises page. If your work is model infrastructure, agents, or developer tools, the center of gravity is not subtle.

Remote is a third of the market, with a catch

811 roles, just under a third of the board, are open to engineers anywhere in the US. The catch is seniority: remote skews senior and staff, because companies buy proven judgment remotely and grow juniors in person. If you are early-career and fully remote, you are competing in the thinnest slice of the market. We keep the feed filterable so you can see exactly what is open at your level.

New York is the second city, and the gap is real

330 roles puts New York clearly second among physical hubs and clearly behind SF. What the count hides is composition: New York over-indexes on fintech, infrastructure for regulated industries, and applied AI inside real businesses. Pay runs close to SF at senior level, as the salary numbers show.

Why US roles only

We list US roles only: onsite roles in US cities, and remote roles workable from the US. That is a deliberate scope, not an accident of sourcing. Our recruiting work, the half of what we do beyond the board, places engineers with US-based founders, and a board that mixes in roles its readers cannot take wastes their time. An automated gate enforces this on every ingestion pass, several times a day.

The second tier is smaller than it feels

After SF, remote, and New York, everything else is 154 roles, about 6 percent of the board, split across LA, Seattle, Austin, Boston, Denver, and Chicago. The hubs have characters worth knowing: LA leans aerospace, defense, and consumer; Seattle skews infrastructure and cloud-adjacent; Boston runs to robotics and biotech tooling; Austin and Denver stay smaller and broader. The lesson is not that these cities are weak. It is that a startup engineering search in them is a domain search, not a volume one.

What the headcount hides: roles per company

2,635 roles across 446 companies is roughly 6 open engineering roles per company on average, and the average lies. Hiring clusters hard: a company that closed a round last month might have 15 roles open while a dozen others have one or none. That clustering is the whole reason we sort by how recently each company raised. The map of where the jobs are is really a map of who just got the money to open them.

What this means if you are choosing a market

• Optimizing for option count: SF, and it is not close. More roles means more shots at the right one.
• Optimizing for flexibility: remote is deep at senior and above. Pair it with a realistic read on remote pay.
• Optimizing for a domain: follow the domain, not the city. Fintech leans New York, aerospace leans LA, model infrastructure leans SF.