How to Get a Job at a Startup

Everyone says that they are looking for "the best of the best" to join their team. But beyond just looking for natural talent, how do companies evaluate candidates?

At Taiv, we’re always keeping our eyes open for incredible talent in all areas. Our people are our greatest asset, and the most important factor to our continued growth and success. We’re reaching new heights in 2026, and to do that, it starts with building a place where the best people want to work, learn, and grow.

The goal of this post is to give strategic advice for your career; not just at Taiv, but in general. Passionate, curious people with a bias for action tend to be very successful in industry and in life. Their first instincts are to build and lead - applicable traits for what makes someone great. They know how to contribute as part of a team, but they’re passionate about pushing the envelope to uncover what’s possible, and build their own path to get there.

We think the most successful people have three common traits. They are smart, hardworking, and passionate.

Usually, people who have these traits have a history doing exceptional and interesting achievements. We look for this in our interviews. We don't really care what you did - just that you did something cool. We hire a lot of college athletes, student group executives, hackathon winners, published academics, marathon runners, etc. If you've put yourself in a situation where most people would have given up, and instead pushed yourself to get through it and compete on an elite level (in any area at all), we believe it says a lot about how smart, hardworking, and passionate you are. We also love hiring former founders. Even if your business failed, we think it says a lot about you if you tried to take a risk and build something you're passionate about. But the further you made it, the more it will impress us.

We also look for people who are good natured - this one isn't strictly correlated to success, but it is correlated to the type of people we want to surround ourselves with and aspire to be ourselves.

For product roles specifically:

We’re tech stack-agnostic. We believe that learning new languages is fairly trivial and that a smart, hardworking, and passionate person with the right background can adapt to any stack.  We’d be foolish to turn away a great developer because they will need to spend a few weeks learning new technology, and we'd be short-sided to hire a bad developer only because their training time would be quicker.

With that said, we do view relevant experience as a bonus. Especially deep technical experience (for example, building AI/computer vision systems for classifying video feeds).

Overall, we’re looking for people who want to dive in on day one and make an impact. People who aren't looking to do just what is required, but are trying to learn and grow as fast as possible will thrive at Taiv and startups in general.

How that shows up for developers depends on level:

Junior: with 0-3 years of experience, we expect you to be able to independently write a basic web application or app and figure out how to distribute it to the world (hosting, app store, etc.). Ideally, the project does something beyond basic CRUD (some light animation, game dev, AI implementation, networking, etc.) to showcase some of the more advanced knowledge you've learned. We love seeing people build side projects beyond university requirement out of passion. Ex:

• Cody built a perlin noise based procedural landscape generator using C# and Unity Engine before joining Taiv. He was also a Lead Coding Instructor at Code Ninjas Winnipeg where he facilitated children’s education in coding and software development (Github)
• Alborz built a Discord bot for staying up-to-date with NBA standings, schedules, etc. He also worked (co-op, part-time, and full time) at three different startups before Taiv. (Github)

Intermediate: with 3-6 years experience, we expect you to be able to dive deep into an area you care about and build something interesting. We don't expect you to be an expert at everything, but you should be able to implement advanced concepts and know how to build and release a production-grade system. We want people who were causal in the success of past teams/roles/companies. Not “I was there”, but “I moved the needle”. Ex:

• Duncan spearheaded many projects at his previous company, and became a team lead for their growth team. He was a driving force behind many of their launches/implementations, and worked cross-functionally with product, design, & marketing.

Senior and beyond: with 6-12+ years experience, we expect you to be pushing the boundaries of knowledge in an area you're passionate about. You should be giving talks at conferences, contributing to open-source projects, and releasing software that implements novel concepts or has real users (paid or free). In your previous role, we expect that you were involved in major initiatives and helped shape the trajectory of the team (and entire company) whether that be through leadership or leading big cross team projects. You should be an expert at some things and broadly knowledgable about common technical concepts. Ex:

• Rob has given >15 talks at international conferences throughout the world as a leading technical expert in architecture, dev/sec/ops, and distributed networks. He also founded multiple tech startups, serving as either CEO or CTO. These included Pricerazzi, Pegboard Hosting, Ukko Robotics, and ArgyleMachine. He’s served in senior developer/CTO roles for >10 years and is an active member in the tech community, including as a director of DC204, Skullspace, Coldhak, MUUG, and Manitoba Repeater Society.

Growth Plans

In 2026, we’re looking to grow the team again. In Q1 alone, we’re hiring for 15+ openings (12 are software developers). By the end of 2026, we expect to hire 60+ people. While are openings are extremely competitive, there will be tons of opportunities to join Taiv and help us fulfill our mission: to develop technology that makes businesses more fun, engaging, profitable, and easier to manage for patrons, business owners, and advertisers.

We will be hiring in all departments including tech, sales, account management, customer support, design, and ops/G+A.

We also host and partake in different events throughout the year. Researching when these are happening and introducing yourself in-person also makes you stand out. At the very least, it gets your foot in the door! Remember, we’re looking for passionate, creative-minded people who genuinely want to help us build the next generation out-of-home entertainment.

If this sounds like the sort of thing that gets you excited, we'd love to meet you. You can check out our careers page here!