I thought she was exaggerating. Then I looked at our data.

The number that surprised us

We track over 104,000 open positions across 8,000+ startups. When we broke them down by function, the result was genuinely unexpected:

Operations roles account for 37% of all startup job listings — 39,285 open positions. Engineering comes second at 33%. Not the other way around.

This isn't a rounding error. Ops leads engineering by four full percentage points and over 5,000 jobs. Yet if you read any tech career advice online, you'd think startups are exclusively looking for people who can write code.

What "ops" actually means at a startup

The word "operations" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, so let me unpack it. At a startup, ops isn't a guy in a warehouse with a clipboard. It's a sprawling category that includes:

Revenue operations — the people who wire together Salesforce, HubSpot, billing systems, and the fifty other tools that a modern SaaS company runs on. RevOps has quietly become one of the most in-demand functions at B2B startups, because the alternative is chaos.

Customer operations — support, success, onboarding, implementation. At a company with 200 customers paying $50K/year each, losing three accounts because onboarding was slow costs more than a senior engineer's salary.

Business operations — the generalists who sit between the CEO and everyone else. They build the dashboards, run the planning cycles, negotiate vendor contracts, and do whatever needs doing that doesn't have a team yet. At companies under 50 people, this role is often the most impactful hire after the founding engineers.

Supply chain and logistics ops — particularly at the growing number of startups that touch physical goods. Delivery, fulfillment, fleet management, procurement. These roles barely register on tech Twitter, but they represent thousands of open positions.

Why nobody talks about this

There's a simple explanation: the people writing about startup careers are mostly engineers and product managers. They write about what they know. The entire content ecosystem around "startup jobs" is optimized for a specific audience — technical candidates in San Francisco — and it systematically ignores the majority of actual hiring.

This creates a weird distortion. Candidates flood engineering roles (which are genuinely competitive) while ops roles sit open for weeks. My friend in Toronto told me her average time-to-fill for a senior ops role is 47 days. For engineering, it's 22 days — not because engineering candidates are better, but because there are simply more of them applying.

The compensation picture

Here's where it gets interesting. Ops roles at startups don't pay engineering salaries — nobody is pretending otherwise. But the gap is narrower than most people assume, especially at the senior level.

A Director of Revenue Operations at a well-funded Series B can realistically earn $180K-$220K base, plus equity. A Head of Business Operations at a growth-stage company often earns more than a mid-level software engineer at the same company. And the path to VP or COO is significantly shorter from ops than from almost any other function.

The math changes further when you factor in competition. If you're a strong ops candidate, you might be one of 30 applicants for a role. If you're a strong generalist engineer, you're one of 300. The expected value calculation isn't as obvious as the raw salary numbers suggest.

The skills that actually transfer

The most interesting thing about startup ops roles is what they prepare you for. I've watched dozens of ops people at startups over the past few years, and the ones who advance fastest share a few traits:

They're comfortable with ambiguity. Ops at a startup means the process doesn't exist yet — you're building it. This is fundamentally different from ops at a large company, where you're optimizing an existing machine.

They're data-literate without being data scientists. They can pull a report from Looker, build a model in a spreadsheet, and explain the results to a non-technical founder. SQL is more useful in startup ops than Python is in most startup engineering roles.

They're systems thinkers. The best ops people see the company as a set of interconnected workflows, not isolated departments. When the sales team complains about lead quality, a good ops person traces the problem back through marketing attribution, lead scoring logic, and CRM configuration to find the actual root cause.

What this means if you're job hunting

If you're looking for a startup role and you're not an engineer, the data is actually in your favor. Operations is the largest hiring category, the competition is lower, and the roles are substantive — not administrative filler.

A few practical moves:

Learn the tools. Salesforce, HubSpot, Looker, Notion, Zapier, and whatever billing system is popular this quarter. Ops at startups is increasingly tool-driven, and knowing the ecosystem is a genuine competitive advantage.

Get comfortable with "figured it out" as a job description. The best ops hires I've seen didn't have perfect resumes. They had stories about messy problems they solved with limited resources. That's what startup founders are actually screening for.

Don't apologize for not being technical. The startup world has a bias toward engineering, but the companies themselves need ops people desperately. The data is unambiguous: 37% of all open roles. That's not a niche — it's the plurality.

The friend in Toronto? She eventually filled those twelve ops roles. It took her three months. The three engineering roles filled in three weeks. Draw your own conclusions about where the opportunity is.