Startup Hiring Trends: Post-Series B AI Developer Demand Boom

Amidst a cold spell hitting the IT developer recruitment market due to economic recession and increased salary burdens, major big tech companies, in particular, are showing conservative movements, even announcing that they have no plans for public recruitment of new IT developers in 2025. Kakao's announcement to restrict new hires for roles that can be replaced by AI is also a facet of this trend. Even amidst this situation, according to an analysis by Groupbuy, a specialized recruitment platform for startups, developer recruitment in startups shows a distinct pattern depending on the company's investment stage. As a result of analyzing 610 developer job postings, demand for full-stack developers in early-stage startups (Seed, Pre-A) was high at 20%. This is interpreted as being due to the high demand for front-end and back-end development in the early stages where app or web services need to be built, and the situational characteristic of needing to handle numerous developments with a small team. On the other hand, after the Series B investment stage, the proportion of job postings for AI and data development roles reached 34%, showing significantly high demand. This is analyzed as being due to the strong tendency of startups at this stage to specialize in business implementation through AI development and to perform segmented tasks in team units. Furthermore, as the importance of infrastructure establishment and strengthening vast data security grows, recruitment for DevOps-related roles is also on the rise. In contrast, recruitment for front-end and back-end development roles showed a decreasing trend after Series B investment, and the proportion of full-stack developer hirings, which was high in the early stages, also nearly halved after Series A investment. However, early-stage startups with a specific AI business model sometimes employ recruitment strategies to implement significant core performance with a small number of AI developers. This suggests that the required tech stack and workforce composition for startups clearly change as they grow.