What stood out this week
Out of the 102 jobs this week, a small startup called Audyse Technology piqued my interest. They're hiring three roles: Founding Hardware Developer, Founding Firmware Developer, and Founding Sales Lead. If you're early in your career and you've ever wondered what "employee number four at a real startup" looks like, this is what it looks like.
AI showed up in 50 of the 102 postings. We'll get into what it actually means below.
A quick baseline: 48 roles are fully remote, 12 hybrid, 5 on-site. Salary appeared on 6 of them. That's why the comp question always feels like guesswork.
Three positions worth a closer look
New grad in St. John's, told there are no junior roles: Strategy & Operations Associate at trophi.ai. Gaming-AI startup, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, already live with 100,000+ users. "Associate" at this kind of company means you do a bit of everything: ops, partnerships, internal projects. Hybrid in St. John's. It's the rarest thing in the whole feed: a posting written for someone early in their career. Ask in the interview what your first 90 days look like, because "we'll figure it out as we go" can mean exciting or it can mean adrift.
Mid-career engineer who wants to build something, not maintain something: Data Engineer at Verlo Finance. St. John's fintech building an "AI Agent OS" for financial advisors. Four open roles right now means they're putting together foundational hires across functions. Remote within Canada. Stack: AWS, SQL, dbt. You'd own everything, with no one to hand a hard problem to. That's either exactly what you want or exactly what burns you out.
Moving into tech from another field: Business Development Representative at CoLab Software. A Business Development Representative (BDR) is an entry-level sales role: take inbound interest, run discovery calls, qualify leads. Comp band is on the posting: $70,000 to $110,000. Most postings this week didn't disclose. CoLab makes software for mechanical engineering teams. If you can hold a conversation, run a discovery call, and learn a product, the skills transfer from teaching, hospitality, retail, anywhere customer-facing. The path: BDR → Account Executive → Senior AE → Manager. The $110K top of the band is for someone two or three years in, not day one.
Under the Surface
About all those "AI" mentions.
50 of the 102 postings mention AI. That number doesn't sit in a vacuum. Yesterday the federal government launched AI for All, a five-year national AI strategy targeting 250,000 new AI-related jobs and 90,000 work placements for young Canadians. If you've been on the fence about leaning into AI skills, that's Ottawa saying yes.
Before you panic that you don't have machine learning on your resume, know that most of those 50 NL mentions are not what you think. They break down four ways.
Some are real AI engineering roles. CoLab is hiring a Director of Engineering for AI and a Senior 3D and AI Systems Software Developer. Spellbook is hiring a Backend / AI Systems Engineer. If you have machine learning experience, these are the ones.
Most are about what the company sells. trophi.ai, Spellbook, Verlo, CoLab build AI products, so their non-engineering postings (Business Development, Customer Success, Marketing) mention AI because the product does. You don't need to fine-tune a model. You need to talk about it credibly.
A handful mean "we use AI tools internally." "Experience with AI tools is a plus" usually means ChatGPT and Copilot. Not a skill gap. That's a Tuesday.
A few are signalling. "We're an AI-first company" is sometimes backed by real work, sometimes it's mostly the vibe.
What to do with it: before you take yourself out of the running, read the actual responsibilities and required skills. "PyTorch" and "production ML systems" is an AI engineering role. "Comfortable with AI products" is a regular role at a company that sells AI. Apply.
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