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👋 Happy Saturday, Jobseekers

We’re trying a new weekend segment where we surface roles for our community that bring awareness to companies that are showing some green flag signals from a hiring perspective.

• 💧 This Week’s Jobs Drop: Positron, ElevenLabs, Waymo, Skyryse, and more

• 🏆️ Bonus: (Chart) Startup layoffs are down, but the floor is still higher

This Week’s Jobs Drop

These listings are from companies with real momentum, not just building a pipeline. Positron, Waymo, Skyryse, and Lotus are rapidly growing with fresh funding and in-demand products. For better odds and fewer dead-end applications, target companies like these.

Positron (AI hardware)

• ASIC Design Verification Engineer – Austin, TX (Hybrid) / Spokane, WA (Hybrid) / US (Remote) – Salary not listed – Verifies ASIC designs and collaborates across teams to ensure functionality and performance.

• Benchmarking and Performance Specialist – Liberty Lake, WA or US (Remote) – Salary not listed – Profiles inference performance across open-source models, builds dashboards, and supports CI/CD + Linux ops.

• IT Systems Administrator – Spokane, WA (On-site) – Salary not listed – Owns on-prem compute, networking, storage, monitoring, VPN access, and incident response for the lab cluster.

• Lead Emulation Engineer – Location not clearly shown on page – Salary not listed – Leads pre-silicon validation strategy on Cadence Palladium, enabling software bring-up pre-tapeout.

• Head of Business Operations – US (Remote) – Salary not listed – CEO-level operator across finance ops, investor relations, GTM programs, contracts, and company execution cadence.

ElevenLabs (Voice AI)

• Deployment Strategist – Remote (US/Canada) with listed hubs (NYC/SF/LA/Boston/DC) – Salary not listed – Forward-deployed engineer/strategist partnering with customers to ship voice products fast.

Waymo (Autonomous vehicles)

• Senior Software Engineer, Growth iOS – Mountain View, CA – Salary not listed on the snippet view – Builds iOS growth experiences, focusing on acquisition, engagement, and retention.

• Senior Staff Software Engineer, Simulator Efficiency – Location not shown in snippet – Salary not listed – Improves simulation efficiency and scale for evaluation systems used by the Waymo Driver.

• Sr. Software Engineer, Core Platforms – Location not shown in snippet – Salary not listed – Builds core platform software and infrastructure that supports multiple autonomy system components.

• Digital Media Lead – Mountain View, CA – Salary not listed – Runs multi-channel digital media strategy tying brand + growth into a full-funnel plan.

Skyryse (Aviation automation)

• Lead Display Software Engineer – El Segundo, CA (On-site) – $180,000 to $210,000 – Leads architecture/dev of aviation display systems, graphics pipelines, and embedded Linux integration.

• Lead Systems Engineer – El Segundo, CA (On-site) – $190,000 to $250,000 – Leads requirements, integration, certification artifacts, and validation for certifiable flight automation systems.

• Senior Systems Test Engineer – El Segundo, CA (On-site) – $150,000 to $170,000 – Owns electromechanical + avionics system test setups, SIL integration, and anomaly/root cause workflows.

• Cybersecurity Lead - IT – El Segundo, CA (On-site) – $120,000 to $150,000 – Leads security program and audit readiness (SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, etc.) in a safety-regulated environment.

Lotus Health (Healthcare AI)

• Founding Data Engineer – San Francisco, CA (On-site) – $200,000 to $250,000 + equity – Builds data pipelines and foundations for product + ops analytics.

• Growth Engineer – San Francisco, CA (On-site) – Salary not clearly shown on the role page snippet – Growth-focused full-stack/data engineering work to drive acquisition and activation experiments.

Fibr AI (AI agents for web)

• Product Engineer - AI – Bengaluru, India – Salary not listed – Backend/platform engineering plus AI integration for agentic personalization and experimentation.

Apeiron Labs (Robotics)

• Test Engineer – Greater Boston Area (Hybrid possible depending on role) – Salary not listed – Builds and executes test plans for autonomous underwater/surface vehicles and mission-level validation.

• Robotics Engineer – Location not shown in snippet – Salary not listed – Designs/builds/characterizes underwater robotic systems (hardware + autonomy).

🏆️ Bonus: Startup layoffs are down, but the floor is still higher

This chart is the cleanest summary of what the last few years felt like. Startups were pretty steady in 2018–2019, then COVID hit and layoffs spiked hard (April 2020 shows 13,485). 2021 calmed down, rates started rising in early 2022, and then things broke open into the peak. The worst month was Jan 2023: 19,178 layoffs.

The part that matters most right now is the right side. 2024–2025 is a slow fade, not a snap back. Layoffs are lower than the peak, but we’re not back to the old baseline. That’s the real takeaway: startups are still running lean, shifting priorities faster, and cutting earlier when something isn’t working.

How to use this if you’re job hunting:

• Pick companies with a reason to exist in a down market. Revenue, compliance, or mission-critical spend beats “cool idea.”

• Interview like you’re buying a house. Ask about runway, what got funded this quarter, and what roles they’re hiring for because they have to, not because they’d like to.

• Aim for core teams. Product areas tied to reliability, security, infra, and monetization tend to survive when the belt tightens.

If you’ve been feeling like the market is still weird even though the headlines say “recovery,” this is why. The panic is down. The new normal is still tougher.

Join the Offboard Community!

Anything and everything we talk about here can be further discussed in our Slack Community (among many other job-seeking-related topics). Just look for the #newsletter channel to find specific topics to talk about!