Ask HN: Are there any DC startups hiring?

DC (and nearby Arlington) has a lot of established companies in the area - all of the big defense contractors are around, as well as the big consulting companies. Many major news companies also have a lot of tech working around, such as USA Today, U. S. News World & Report, Washington Post, Bloomberg, etc. And of course, all of the government agencies.

OPower had a $100 million IPO earlier in the year - they have some good employees (I know some of them).

Palantir does business in the area (unsurprisingly, given that part of their funding comes from the CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel, and their business is in visualization & analytics).

Thinkgeek is in Fairfax (I believe they're owned by someone else now though?), and Custom Ink in Tyson's Corner.

The Motley Fool is a fun company in Alexandria (been around for a while though) in the business of financial advice.

I formerly worked at Learning Objects, which is a bootstrapped edtech company - really miss my time working there, the environment beat all of the Valley companies I've been at so far easily IMO. LO is based right in the heart of Dupont Circle, maybe the envy of all of the tech companies in the area in terms of location being right at the north side metro stop.

Rally Health (formerly Audax Health) is one that got bought out by UnitedHealth earlier in the year.

Optoro is another shop that has been doing well, had a Series B round earlier in the year & some excellent engineers.

TrackMaven is a startup in the marketing space that has been doing pretty well - I worked for a company in the Valley once who viewed them as sort of competitors.

Vox Media is between Dupont & Farragut Square I believe (they run Vox, Polygon, SBNation), probably a fun place for a more designer oriented person.

There are a lot out there - keep in mind though, while it is an employee's market in the DC area market right now, there is only so much they are able to pay. Pay seems to be more commensurate with experience. If money is of concern, you're not going to beat government contracting. Otherwise, there are a bunch of great startups to choose from around.

I'm not very familiar with the DC market, but I did a quick search on AngelList to write this comment. Here's a few company's that jumped out to me:

- FiscalNote: Real-time open data analysis - Contactually: CRM - Vero Analytics: Analytics platform

I know that LivingSocial is based in DC. I believe they may be the biggest startup in the city (size and popularity).

I work for a company in D.C. called Virtru. We write tools which allow users to easily send end-to-end encrypted email in one click from gmail. My comment on the "who's hiring?" thread this month has more details and is reproduced below. Definitely get in touch if what we're working on interests you!

Virtru | https://virtru.com/how-it-works | Washington, D.C. | Fulltime | Javascript fullstack, Android, iOS, .NET

== Who we are ==

Everyone has a right to keep their digital content private and secure. We founded Virtru because we believe that exercising that right should be easy and convenient.

Virtru allows you to send end-to-end encrypted email using your existing email address and email provider with the flip of a switch. Our browser extension for Chrome and Firefox allows you to send and receive encrypted email directly from Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.com. Our Android and iOS mobile apps and Outlook desktop plugin work with any provider that uses IMAP.

Our full time team of 16 is currently 50% engineers. We value automated testing, readable/maintainable code, documentation, and code reviews. We run in 2 week sprints and dedicate about 20% of total capacity to things the dev team thinks are important (technical debt, refactors, exploring a new technology, etc), while the rest goes to feature development and addressing bugs. We are well capitalized with investments from Bessemer Venture Partners [0] and private investors.

== Current positions ==

- Full stack NodeJS/Javascript developer. Our backend runs on NodeJS (with dabbles of Python), our frontend uses Angular and Backbone (looking to consolidate!), and our browser extensions use our internal javascript framework to run in both Chrome and Firefox.

- Android developer

- iOS/Mac OS developer

- .NET developer to support our Outlook desktop plugin

I work on the backend, so I can provide some details on that role. Our client facing API services are built on Express.js. We run in the AWS cloud and are looking for someone with deep experience deploying/maintaining services/infrastructure who can also help add new functionality to the application layer.

Some things we play with on the backend: NodeJS, ExpressJS, PassportJS, AWS (EC2, SQS, ElastiCache), CouchDB, Packer, Salt Stack, ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), HAProxy 1.5, PagerDuty.

Some more information is listed here: https://www.virtru.com/careers.

== Get in touch ==

If you care about privacy and are interested in creating security products at a company which thinks that user experience is a first class citizen, please get in touch! Send a secure email (using Virtru!) to feedback@virtru.com with subject “HN who is hiring response” and tell us what interests you about Virtru. It would be great if you can provide some sample code that we can check out (github, bitbucket, etc). If you have any questions, I’ll monitor this thread and/or you can email me directly (email in profile).

[0] http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/virtru