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Every minute. We scan thousands of hiring sources in real-time so you see roles as soon as they go live, often hours before they appear on public job boards.Early access = higher odds of getting interviewed.

Why can I only view limited per day on the free plan?

Free access gives everyone a fair starting point. But seeing every job instantly creates an unfair advantage, so unlimited browsing is reserved for Pro users who want full access to fresh, hidden, and time-sensitive roles. Limiting free browsing also prevents automated scraping by competitors.

What sources do you pull jobs from?

We aggregate from: - company career pages - startup platforms - ATS systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, etc.) - niche regional job boards - hidden talent networks not indexed by Google Over 50,000 sources → one unified feed.

Are these jobs legitimate?

Yes. We automatically remove: - expired listings - spam - shady postings - duplicates - fake "ghost jobs" Every job you see is active, real, and verified at the source.

What’s the benefit of upgrading to Pro?

Pro gives you an information advantage. You unlock: - unlimited job browsing - real-time alerts for your saved filters - early access to newly discovered roles - deeper filtering (salary, remote, visa, experience, etc.) - access to hidden sources most job seekers never find Pro users consistently apply earlier and get significantly higher interview rates.

Can I filter by location, experience, remote, or salary?

Yes and Pro unlocks the power filters job boards don’t show you, including: - roles posted in the last 24 hours - company ATS only - startup-only sources - remote-flex categories - international roles by timezone

Why are early alerts so important?

Most job applications pile up within the first 6–12 hours after posting. If you apply early, you skip the crowd and rank higher in recruiter screening. Our alerts give you that timing advantage.

If the employer provides it, yes. If not, we attempt to estimate using salary bands from public and private datasets (Pro only).

Is DayOneJobs suitable for senior roles too?

Yes. We cover all roles, from internships to senior-level. Filters simply let you tailor your feed to your level.

What's the typical salary range for Principal Engineers in San Francisco?

Principal Engineers in SF typically earn $280K-$450K total compensation, with base salaries of $200K-$300K plus significant equity packages. FAANG and unicorn startups often exceed these ranges, especially for AI/ML specialists.

Which San Francisco neighborhoods are popular with Principal Engineers?

SOMA and Mission Bay offer proximity to major tech offices, while Potrero Hill and Noe Valley provide family-friendly environments. Many also choose Palo Alto or Mountain View for easier access to Peninsula companies.

What are the top hiring companies for Principal Engineers in SF?

Major employers include Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, and numerous AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic. FAANG companies (Google, Meta, Apple) also maintain significant SF engineering presence beyond their Peninsula headquarters.

How does the startup equity landscape affect Principal Engineer compensation?

SF's concentration of Series A-C startups creates unique equity opportunities for Principal Engineers. Many receive 0.1-0.5% equity stakes that can be worth millions in successful exits, significantly boosting total career earnings.

What technical meetups and communities exist for senior engineers in SF?

The Bay Area hosts numerous groups including SF Engineering Leadership, Papers We Love SF, and domain-specific meetups for AI/ML, distributed systems, and security. Many companies also host regular tech talks open to the community.

How does remote work flexibility compare between SF companies?

Most SF tech companies offer hybrid arrangements with 2-3 days in office, though some startups require full presence for collaboration. The competitive talent market has pushed most employers toward flexible policies for senior roles.

What's the career progression timeline for reaching Principal Engineer level in SF?

Typical progression takes 8-12 years total experience, with 3-5 years at senior level before promotion. SF's fast-paced environment and startup culture can accelerate this timeline for high performers, especially those joining early-stage companies.

Principal Engineer
jobs in San Francisco that
LinkedIn doesn't show

2 roles from funded startups and hidden sources. Posted
minutes ago. Updated every 60 seconds

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Open roles2

Median salary band$261k

Companies hiring2

Avg time to fill18 days

We pull jobs from sources most job seekers never check

San Francisco startups funded

Corgi

Founded 2024

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$160M raised51-200 employeesSeries BB2B

Corgi is an AI-native, full-stack insurance carrier built for startups, using modern infrastructure and artificial intelligence to handle underwriting, policy management, and claims so it can deliver fast, flexible commercial insurance tailored to growing companies.[2][5]

Raised

$160M

Series B · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco, California

United States

Standard Intelligence

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$75M raised1-10 employeesSeries ASeries A

Standard Intelligence is a San Francisco-based AI research lab building foundation models optimized for computer use — agents that interact with software through its graphical interface. Its FDM-1 model is trained on video footage rather than annotated screenshots, using an inverse dynamics model to auto-generate captions, and ships with a video encoder the team says is roughly 100x more efficient than comparable alternatives. The six-person team is pursuing what it calls aligned artificial general intelligence by scaling agentic capabilities through video pretraining.

Raised

$75M

Series A · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco, California

United States

HockeyStack

Founded 2021

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$50M raised51-200 employeesSeries AB2B

HockeyStack is a San Francisco-based enterprise revenue intelligence platform that builds AI Revenue Agents for go-to-market teams. Its event-based data architecture and machine-learning Blueprint model power autonomous agents that work alongside reps on prospecting, new business, and account expansion, with customers including Microsoft, New Relic, and Harvey.

Raised

$50M

Series A · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco, California

United States

Noon

Founded 2024

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$44M raised11-50 employeesSeries APlatform

Noon is an AI-native product design tool that bridges the gap between product design and engineering. Unlike traditional design tools that produce static visual mockups, Noon pulls code directly from a team's codebase and design system, ensuring what a designer produces is what ships. AI is embedded throughout to handle repetitive tasks while keeping designers in creative control. Founded in October 2024 by IIT Guwahati alumni Aditya Bandi and Kushagra Sinha.

Raised

$44M

Series A · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco

United States

Ulysses

Founded 2023

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$38M raised1-10 employeesSeries ASeries A

Ulysses is a San Francisco-based technology company building The Ocean Company — networked fleets of low-cost, autonomous surface and underwater vehicles engineered for persistent operation in harsh maritime environments. The platform spans mine countermeasures and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for contested waters, protection of subsea critical infrastructure, offshore inspection, and ocean-conservation work such as seagrass restoration; flagship products include MAKO, a small autonomous underwater vehicle positioned as the "Model T for the ocean", and Leviathan, an autonomous surface mothership and maritime domain awareness platform. Founded in Dublin in 2023 by Akhil Voorakkara, Will OBrien, Jamie Wedderburn and Colm OBrien, the company now operates from 1640 17th Street, San Francisco, and counts the US Navy among its active customers.

Raised

$38M

Series A · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco, California

United States

Afresh

Founded 2017

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$34M raised51-200 employeesSeries BB2B

Afresh is a San Francisco-based AI platform for the grocery industry, founded in 2017 by Matt Schwartz, Nathan Fenner, and Volodymyr Kuleshov. Its software orchestrates store-level ordering, inventory management, production planning, and distribution-center buying across fresh, center store, frozen, and general merchandise. Afresh operates in more than 12,500 departments across 40 U.S. states and partners with grocers including Albertsons Companies, Meijer, Stater Bros., and Wakefern.

Raised

$34M

Series B · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco, California

United States

Judgment Labs

Founded 2025

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$32M raised11-50 employeesSeries APlatform

Judgment Labs builds infrastructure that turns AI agents production data — reasoning traces, tool calls, retries, memory — into evals, alerts, and continuous-improvement loops. Its platform analyzes the full agent trajectory rather than just final outputs, surfacing failure patterns so teams can ship targeted fixes. Founded by three childhood friends (Alex Shan, Andrew Li, Joseph Camyre), the San Francisco company already powers monitoring at a growing roster of agent-native startups.

Raised

$32M

Series A · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco, California

United States

Comfy

Founded 2024

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$30M raised11-50 employeesSeries BPlatform

San Francisco-based Comfy Org is the team behind ComfyUI, a node-based workflow platform that gives visual professionals granular control over AI image, video, 3D, and audio generation. Originally released as an open-source project in 2023, ComfyUI has grown to more than four million users and a 60,000-node community ecosystem, and is used by studios, ad agencies, and enterprise creative teams as production infrastructure. Alongside the open-source tool the company operates Comfy Cloud, a hosted runtime for teams that need collaboration, security, and managed compute.

Raised

$30M

Series B · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco

United States

Hilbert's AI

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$28M raised11-50 employeesSeries APlatform

Hilbert's AI (legally Hilbert AI Co.) is a San Francisco-based analytics and decision-automation software company that builds an AI-native growth platform for consumer (B2C) brands. The product unifies marketing, product and commerce data, uses deep-learning agents to interpret customer behaviour and recommend next-best actions, and quantifies the financial upside of each recommendation before execution — compressing multi-month analytics projects into weeks. Walmart and other consumer brands use Hilbert's to turn AI spend into measurable growth outcomes, with the platform also serving as a forecasting engine for customer-base and revenue trajectories.

Raised

$28M

Series A · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco, CA

United States

Treeline

Founded 2025

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$25M raised11-50 employeesSeries AAI/ML

Treeline is a San Francisco-based AI-powered IT, security, and compliance platform for growing tech companies, founded by Peter Doyle (CEO) and Hussain Kader (CTO). The platform acts as a full external IT and security team, offering 24/7 AI-enhanced help desk, automated workflows, continuous monitoring, and integrations with tools like Okta, Crowdstrike, Google Workspace, and Vanta. Treeline delivers 80% faster response times and automates 98% of IT tickets, positioning itself as a modern IT operating system for fast-scaling businesses.

Raised

$25M

Series A · 2026

Key contacts

Leadership & hiring contacts indexed

HQ market

San Francisco, California

United States

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Interview prep for Principal Engineer roles

Principal Engineer interviews focus heavily on architectural thinking, technical leadership, and cross-team collaboration skills.. Explore key insights and preparation tips to help you excel in your interview process.

CODING PREP

Advanced algorithmic thinking

Principal Engineer coding rounds test optimization skills, complex data structures, and ability to discuss trade-offs at scale.

DifficultyHard+

Focus on system-level optimizations

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SYSTEM DESIGN COURSES

Architecture at enterprise scale

Design distributed systems handling millions of users, with focus on reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.

Distributed Systems
Multi-region architectures
Microservices
Service mesh & observability
Data Architecture
Event-driven systems

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COMPANY INSIGHTS

Leadership & technical vision

Companies evaluate your ability to drive technical strategy, mentor teams, and influence engineering culture.

Meta
Cross-functional leadership and infrastructure scaling
Stripe
Technical decision-making and platform architecture

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Why San Francisco stands out

Compare cost-of-living buying power and how crowded the market is versus other major tech cities—so you can focus your search where the odds fit your goals.

Premium Compensation Offsets Higher Living Costs

While San Francisco housing costs run approximately 15-20% higher than New York, Principal Engineer salaries typically exceed NYC by $40-60K annually. The concentration of high-growth startups and pre-IPO equity opportunities creates exceptional wealth-building potential that significantly outweighs the cost differential.

New York baseline100

San Francisco (18% lower)82

Favorable Market Dynamics Despite Tech Hub Status

San Francisco maintains lower Principal Engineer saturation than other major tech centers due to the city's focus on senior IC tracks over management hierarchies.

San Francisco

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New York

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Principal Engineer jobs in San Francisco that LinkedIn doesn't show

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