Top 10 Tech Startups Hiring Junior Developers in Bellevue, WA in 2026

Table of Contents

• You’re Not Picking an Apartment. You’re Picking a Career.
• Zenoti
• Icertis
• Tanium
• Qumulo
• DigniFi
• Blue Canoe
• Reflective
• Govstream.ai
• SunCore Digital
• Belva.ai
• How to Choose Your First Bellevue Startup
• Frequently Asked Questions

Zenoti

Walking into Zenoti is like touring that rare Bellevue apartment that actually matches the photos: a sleek lobby, real natural light, and enough room to grow without feeling like you’re crammed into a closet. Headquartered on the Eastside, Zenoti builds cloud software for spas, salons, and wellness brands - scheduling, payments, inventory, marketing, analytics - all bundled into one vertical SaaS platform. It regularly shows up on curated lists like Wellfound’s best tech companies and startups in Bellevue, which is a decent external signal that it’s more than just a flashy landing page.

Why it’s a strong first job

From the outside, Zenoti hits a nice balance for a first role: big enough to have real process, small enough that you’re not one junior in a sea of hundreds. It behaves like a scaleup, with structure, documentation, and career ladders, but still feels closer to a product startup than a slow-moving enterprise vendor. For juniors, signals that matter show up in the details: repeated “Software Engineer I” and early-career postings, a business built on thousands of paying customers instead of ad impressions, and cross-functional work with product and customer success so you see the impact of your code instead of tossing Jira tickets into the void. Seed-stage tourists come and go; companies like Zenoti, which appear in long-running Bellevue startup roundups on Seedtable, are usually the ones actually promoting people over multiple years.

What you’d actually build

On the inside, your “rooms” at Zenoti look very different from toy CRUD apps. As a junior engineer, you’re likely to touch production flows that move real money and real bookings: implementing and testing online booking journeys that handle millions of appointments per month, wiring internal APIs that keep scheduling, point-of-sale, and inventory modules in sync, or shipping UI improvements to dashboards that franchise owners live in all day. Because the platform is leaning into AI-powered features - things like automated marketing campaigns or demand forecasting - you’ll also see how data from thousands of locations gets turned into recommendations and predictions, even if you’re officially a full-stack or backend dev. Along the way, you’re working in standard web stacks (think TypeScript/React plus a .NET or Java backend with SQL/NoSQL) and getting early exposure to the unglamorous realities of scale: slow queries, concurrency bugs, and performance regressions that only show up once real salons start their day.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

In the Seattle-Bellevue market, vertical SaaS unicorns typically pay new grads well enough that the “salary room” is one of the nicest in the apartment. For a company like Zenoti, junior base comp often lands in the $120K-$150K range, plus some mix of bonus and equity, fitting comfortably inside the broader Bellevue new-grad band of $108,000 to $185,000 that shows up in regional offer trackers. With Washington’s no state income tax, that take-home tends to beat the same sticker salary in San Francisco or New York. When you do your walkthrough, ask very concrete questions: how many Software Engineer I and II folks they’ve promoted in the last couple of years, an example of a junior-led feature that shipped recently, and who will regularly review your pull requests. If the answers feel specific and recent - not vague or aspirational - you’ve probably found a place where the mentorship, AI exposure, and growth paths live up to the glossy listing.

Icertis

If Zenoti is the polished Eastside one-bedroom, Icertis is the high-rise with a serious office downstairs: enterprise lobby, badge scanners, the whole deal. Headquartered near Bellevue’s core, Icertis built its name on contract lifecycle management and what it calls “contract intelligence” for huge enterprises. Its software ingests mountains of legal and commercial documents for Fortune 500 customers and surfaces what actually matters in those contracts. You’ll see it pop up again and again on regional lists, from the F6S directory of Bellevue startups and scaleups to Built In’s overview of top tech companies in Bellevue, a good hint that it’s become part of the Eastside’s core enterprise stack.

Why it’s a strong first job

From a junior’s perspective, Icertis is one of the cleanest ways to get close to real AI without having “ML Engineer” in your title. The core product is unapologetically data-heavy: natural language processing for clause extraction, similarity, and risk scoring; analytics that help legal and procurement teams actually understand what they’ve signed. Because it sells into banks, manufacturers, and pharma, the customer base skews conservative and long-term, which is a quiet but important signal of stability compared to hype-driven consumer apps. You’re not just learning to code; you’re learning how AI gets wired into workflows for some of the most risk-sensitive organizations in the world.

What you’d actually build

Day to day, the “rooms” you’ll spend time in are very different from a typical CRUD dashboard. Junior engineers at a contract intelligence company are likely to build and maintain ingestion APIs that pull contracts from CRMs, ERPs, and document systems; implement features around clause search, approvals, and version history in a modern web UI; and help wire new ML-powered capabilities (like a “non-standard clause” flag or a risk score) into the product in a way business users actually trust. You’d work shoulder-to-shoulder with data engineering and applied ML teams even if your title is full-stack, seeing how models are versioned, deployed, and monitored in production, and how to debug the seams where model output meets business logic.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

As a global enterprise SaaS vendor competing directly with big names in the Seattle-Bellevue corridor, Icertis generally has to keep junior compensation in the game. For Software Engineer I roles in Bellevue, that often means base salaries in the low- to mid-$100Ks, plus some combination of RSUs or options and performance bonus, along with the kind of benefits package you’d expect from an established enterprise player. When you “walk through” Icertis like an apartment, focus less on the marble in the lobby and more on the plumbing: which teams actually onboard new grads, how long it typically takes before a junior owns a feature end-to-end, and how non-ML engineers collaborate with the AI teams on design, reviews, and incidents. Pair those answers with the external signals you see in regional listings, and you’ll have a much clearer sense of whether this is just a nice view - or a place where you can really learn contract-scale AI from the inside.

Tanium

Stepping into Tanium is like touring a building with a reinforced concrete core: maybe not as glossy as some downtown lofts, but rock solid in all the places you actually care about when a storm hits. Tanium has grown from scrappy security startup to major enterprise player with a strong footprint in the Seattle-Bellevue talent market, and it shows up regularly in local tech-company overviews as a go-to for engineers who want to work on serious security and systems management problems instead of another to-do app.

Why it’s a strong first job

For a junior dev, culture and stability can matter as much as stack or title. Tanium stands out because employee reviews consistently highlight “faith in leadership” at 4.7/5 and work-life balance at 4.4/5 on Glassdoor in Bellevue-focused rundowns of top tech employers. Those are rare scores for a company operating in a domain as high-pressure as cybersecurity. On top of that, security and endpoint management are inherently sticky: once your agents are deployed across thousands of laptops and servers, customers don’t rip you out lightly. That combination of mission-critical product and strong leadership ratings is exactly the kind of hidden “soundproofing” you want in your first apartment.

What you’d actually build

Inside Tanium’s “unit,” the work is much closer to structural engineering than interior decorating. Juniors are likely to touch endpoint agents that run on Windows, macOS, or Linux; backend services that aggregate data from millions of machines; and dashboards that security teams live in during incidents. You might implement or optimize real-time data collectors, build views that visualize patch status and threat activity, or work on backend query engines that let security teams ask complex questions across an entire fleet in seconds. That domain forces you into good habits early: safe defaults, strict testing and deployment processes, performance profiling, and an instinct for how seemingly small changes behave at massive scale. It’s exactly the kind of “deep end” experience recruiters for future roles quietly love to see when they scan your history on sites like the Bellevue junior software engineer listings on LinkedIn.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

Because Tanium competes for talent not just with local startups but also with Seattle-Bellevue’s cloud and big-tech players, junior compensation typically lands at the upper end of regional new-grad offers, plus equity that reflects its still-private, high-growth status. When you “walk through” Tanium as a prospective junior hire, you’re checking more than just the salary room: ask how often junior engineers participate in on-call, what the support structure looks like when an incident wakes you up at 2 a.m., and whether recent security events have been used as learning opportunities or fire drills. Pair those answers with external signals from broader junior job boards like ZipRecruiter’s Bellevue junior developer listings - where you’ll see how many roles demand security awareness - and you’ll have a much clearer sense of whether Tanium is just another name on your spreadsheet, or the place where you’ll actually learn to build hardened systems that keep real companies safe.

Qumulo

Qumulo is the apartment that doesn’t just have a nice living room - it quietly comes with a server room in the basement. Known for its scale-out file storage systems and data services, Qumulo is tightly woven into the greater Seattle-Bellevue ecosystem even if its mailing address leans Seattle. For you, that means working at an infrastructure company that actually shows up in “who’s hiring juniors?” conversations, not just in glossy cloud conference talks.

Why it’s a strong first job

The biggest green flag here is simple and rare: Qumulo explicitly posts “Software Development Engineer: Entry-Level” roles, including ones aimed at 2026 graduates. On job boards tracking Bellevue openings, like the entry-level software engineer listings on Indeed, it’s one of the few infrastructure players that doesn’t hide junior work behind vague “early career” branding. That usually means interview loops calibrated for people on their first job, onboarding actually designed for new grads, and a culture where it’s normal - expected even - to ask basic questions about distributed systems without feeling like an imposter.

What you’d actually build

Inside, Qumulo’s “rooms” are very much backend-first. As a junior, you’re likely to work on features in the distributed file system itself - things like snapshots, replication, and quota management - rather than being pushed off to internal tools. You might profile and fix hot code paths that only misbehave under petabyte-scale load, or help build management UIs and APIs that surface system status, capacity, and alerts in ways that customers can actually act on. A big part of the job is writing stress and failure-injection tests that prove the system behaves when disks fail, networks partition, or someone misconfigures a cluster at 3 a.m. If you’re thinking long term about data infrastructure or AI-heavy backends (training pipelines, feature stores, analytics platforms), understanding how storage really works at this level becomes a quiet career superpower.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

Infrastructure startups with real customers tend to compensate juniors well enough that the “runway room” and the “salary room” both feel livable. At a company like Qumulo, junior base salaries commonly land in the $115K-$140K range, plus equity whose upside is tied to future growth, acquisition, or an eventual IPO. The experience itself is also highly portable: alumni from storage and data-platform teams often end up at cloud providers or AI infrastructure companies, where deep systems knowledge is in short supply. When you walk through Qumulo like an apartment, ask how many entry-level developers they’ve onboarded in the last 12-18 months and how many are still there; whether new grads start on core storage components or get shunted to peripheral tooling; and how they mix junior and senior engineers on critical projects. Pair those answers with the volume of junior postings you see across sites like the Bellevue junior developer listings on JobToday, and you’ll know if this is just another line in your spreadsheet - or the place where you’ll actually learn to think in distributed systems.

DigniFi

DigniFi is the kind of place where your code doesn’t just move pixels; it gets someone’s car back on the road. Focused on automotive repair and vehicle financing, this Bellevue-focused fintech connects drivers, dealerships, and lenders so people can afford critical repairs and upgrades. In local startup roundups, it’s noted for raising over $175M in funding, putting it well past the fragile seed stage and into the “we have real runway and real customers” category that matters when you’re picking your first place to live, metaphorically and literally.

Why it’s a strong first job

As a junior dev, you want somewhere that feels both grounded and modern. DigniFi checks that box by operating in a very tangible domain (auto repairs and financing) while still behaving like a fast-moving tech company. That funding level usually translates into a longer financial runway than tiny seed startups, plus the ability to invest in things juniors care about but can’t see on a job listing: onboarding, documentation, and senior engineers who aren’t stretched so thin they can’t review your PRs. Because this is regulated fintech, you also get an early education in doing things right the first time - audits, compliance, and risk reviews are part of the air you breathe - which is a quiet advantage when you later apply to more mature firms that value discipline as much as velocity. Articles that break down Eastside tech employers by growth and pay, like Nucamp’s analysis of top tech companies to work for in 2026, highlight how Bellevue fintech and payments players often blend this kind of rigor with startup-level ownership.

What you’d actually build

On the inside, the “rooms” you spend time in at DigniFi are all connected to money moving in the real world. As a junior engineer, you might build APIs that partners’ point-of-sale systems use to request instant credit decisions, implement and test flows for loan applications, approvals, and repayments, or extend dashboards that customer success and risk teams rely on to monitor portfolio health. You’re likely to work in a modern cloud stack - think Node/TypeScript or Java/.NET backends, relational databases, and event queues - while collaborating with data scientists or analysts working on fraud and risk models. You won’t be training deep learning systems yourself on day one, but you will see how even relatively simple models and rule engines get wired into financial workflows and what it takes to make them explainable enough that lenders, dealers, and regulators are comfortable.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

In terms of the “salary room,” DigniFi usually lands squarely in the local fintech norm for juniors, with base compensation often in the $110K-$140K range plus equity that actually has room to grow if the company cements itself as a category leader or becomes an attractive acquisition target. In Washington, that paycheck benefits from the lack of state income tax, so your effective take-home can compare favorably to peers in other hubs even at the same nominal base. When you walk through DigniFi like an apartment, focus on the pipes behind the walls: ask how they balance shipping speed with regulatory requirements, whether juniors get to work on core lending flows or are confined to internal admin tools, and how closely engineers collaborate with the teams that own risk and compliance. Clear answers there will tell you whether this is just another nicely staged listing - or a fintech home where you can actually grow into someone trusted to ship code that moves real dollars.

Blue Canoe

Blue Canoe feels less like a glassy downtown tower and more like a bright, quirky studio that’s been thoughtfully set up for learning. It’s an EdTech startup using AI and speech recognition to help non-native speakers improve English pronunciation, which puts it at a really cool intersection of language, education, and machine learning in the Seattle-Bellevue scene. Instead of optimizing ad clicks, you’re literally helping people sound more confident in job interviews, standups, and hallway conversations.

Why it’s a strong first job

For a junior dev who actually cares about mission, Blue Canoe has a lot going for it. The impact is extremely concrete: your features help learners advance careers and integrate into English-speaking workplaces. Because the product leans heavily on speech recognition and ML models, you get exposure to AI even if your title is “Software Engineer” and not “Machine Learning Engineer.” And with a smaller team than the big Bellevue logos, it has the vibe of a place where your code doesn’t just disappear into a massive monolith; you can usually point to a feature and say “I built that.” In a metro where companies like Ada Developers Academy have made inclusive, learner-focused tech culture a thing - Ada calls itself a “tuition-free software development school for women and gender expansive adults” on its own history page - Blue Canoe fits right into that broader ecosystem of tech as an education tool, not just a growth engine.

What you’d actually build

Inside Blue Canoe’s “unit,” almost every room touches audio in some way. As a junior, you might work on mobile features (React Native, Swift, or Kotlin) that guide learners through pronunciation exercises and games, or on backend services that store anonymized recordings, track progress, and feed analytics. You’ll spend time integrating and tuning speech recognition APIs, wiring up custom scoring models, and making sure the UX makes sense even when the model gets it slightly wrong. You also get early reps with the messy reality of real-world data: noisy microphones, background chatter, accents, and all the edge cases that never show up in neat tutorial datasets. That’s invaluable if you want to work around AI in the long term, because you see how models behave in the wild, not just in a lab notebook.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

Comp-wise, smaller mission-driven AI startups like Blue Canoe typically sit a bit below the Amazons and Microsofts of the world on base salary, but make up for it with ownership and visibility. For an entry-level engineer, you might expect base pay in the $100K-$120K range in the Bellevue-Seattle area, plus stock options that actually mean something on a small cap table. The trade is simple: slightly less cash than a FAANG, in exchange for more responsibility and a direct line of sight from your work to learner outcomes. When you do your “walkthrough,” ask how often they retrain or update models and whether app engineers get pulled into those projects; get a concrete example of a junior-led experiment that improved learning metrics; and listen for how they talk about mentoring newer devs. Cross-check what you hear with the broader culture signals from places like Built In Seattle’s list of companies with mentorship programs - you’re trying to confirm that behind the friendly EdTech branding, there’s real support for growth, not just a cozy paint job on thin walls.

Reflective

Reflective is like walking into a compact, cleverly designed loft where every inch has a purpose. On the surface, it’s a no-code/low-code workflow automation startup; behind the walls, it’s wired by people who’ve spent years thinking about how developers learn. Co-founder Bookis Worthy also co-founded Ada Developers Academy, one of the most respected tuition-free programs for women and gender-diverse people in software engineering, so the DNA here skews heavily toward mentorship and nontraditional paths. According to GeekWire’s coverage of Reflective’s launch, the company raised a $1.3M seed round to reimagine how companies automate their internal workflows, putting it firmly in the “small team, real funding” category rather than an idea on a whiteboard.

Why it’s a strong first job

For a junior dev or bootcamp grad, Reflective’s biggest selling point is that the founders already understand what it’s like to be in your shoes. People who built a developer bootcamp tend to take things like structured onboarding, clear expectations, and humane code review seriously. The no-code/low-code product focus also means your perspective as someone closer to the “tool user” than the veteran architect is genuinely valuable; ops, marketing, and finance teams are the ones dragging blocks around in the workflow editor, not just other engineers. Early-stage companies like Reflective show up in ecosystems tracked on platforms such as the Y Combinator jobs board for Bellevue, which is full of similarly lean teams looking for engineers who can grow quickly into ownership, not just follow tickets.

What you’d actually build

Inside Reflective’s “apartment,” every room is lined with whiteboards. As a junior, you’re not writing scripts for someone else to drag-and-drop around; you’re building the platform that makes drag-and-drop possible. That could mean implementing the visual workflow editor and component library in React or a similar front-end framework, designing connectors to SaaS tools (think Slack, Salesforce, or internal REST APIs), or working on orchestration services that reliably run user-defined workflows at scale. Because “no-code” is quickly blending with AI, you’re also likely to touch features like AI-assisted step suggestions or “generate a workflow from a natural language description,” where prompts, model calls, and error handling all live side by side with traditional application code. It’s a front-row seat to how AI and automation are actually changing day-to-day business processes, not just headline demos.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

On the comp side, seed-stage startups like Reflective usually trade a bit of cash for more meaningful ownership. For a junior engineer, that often looks like base pay in the $92K-$118K range in the Seattle-Bellevue market, plus an options grant that’s nontrivial on a small cap table. The real question in your walkthrough isn’t just “What’s the salary?” but “How long is the runway?” and “Who’s responsible for mentoring me?” With a $1.3M raise, you’ll want to ask how many months of runway the team has at current burn, what milestones they’re aiming for before the next round, and how many other early-career devs they’ve already brought on. Listen for specifics about pairing, code review norms, and time set aside for learning; if those answers feel as thoughtfully laid out as the product vision, you may have found a small but well-designed place to grow from junior into someone who can one day design their own floorplan.

Govstream.ai

Govstream.ai is that unassuming building on a quiet side street that turns out to be surprisingly important to the neighborhood. With a team of about six people, it’s an early-stage startup backed by Ascend.vc, a Pacific Northwest seed fund that supported the company from day one. Their focus is resolutely unsexy on the surface - modernizing government permitting with AI - but that “paperwork” is the bottleneck behind housing, EV charging stations, and a lot of the infrastructure everyone in Bellevue argues about over coffee.

Why it’s a strong first job

For a junior dev, Govstream.ai is the definition of high-impact, high-ownership. You’re not just ticket-taking on a massive team; you’re helping build the core product for cities and agencies that still run on PDFs and counter windows. Being backed early by a local seed firm means there’s more structure and support than a bootstrapped side project, but the company is still small enough that your ideas can influence the roadmap. Ascend’s portfolio writeups emphasize founders “tackling overlooked, foundational problems” across the region, and Govstream.ai fits that mold perfectly: quietly critical, hard to do well, and full of room for a junior engineer to grow into the person who knows the system best.

What you’d actually build

Inside this “apartment,” almost every room leads back to documents and decisions. As a junior engineer, you might build web interfaces where planners, developers, and citizens submit and track permits; design document-ingestion pipelines that extract key fields from scanned forms; or help integrate models that classify permit types, flag incomplete submissions, or predict processing times based on historical data. You’ll touch the glue code that connects AI outputs into workflows public servants can actually act on - things like status dashboards, notification systems, and exception queues. That means working across a fairly standard modern stack (likely TypeScript/React plus a Python or Node backend) while getting hands-on experience with how AI is woven into line-of-business software instead of just demo apps.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

On compensation, Govstream.ai sits squarely in the seed-stage startup zone: junior base salaries often land around $85K-$110K, paired with equity grants that are significantly larger than what you’d see at a later-stage company. The trade-off is clear: more risk, more ownership, more upside if they hit product-market fit with agencies that desperately need this. When you do your walkthrough, ask very direct questions: how many months of runway they have at current burn, what the hiring plan looks like over the next year, and which senior engineer is explicitly responsible for mentoring juniors. Cross-check that against broader entry-level benchmarks from places like Robert Half’s entry-level software engineer salary guides so you know whether the equity and learning curve justify the cash trade-off. If the answers are specific and transparent, you’ve likely found a small, slightly rough-around-the-edges place where you can have an outsized impact from day one.

SunCore Digital

SunCore Digital is like that high-ceilinged corner unit you almost miss because the building doesn’t have a giant logo out front. It’s a high-trust, remote-friendly product studio that focuses on building purposeful modern technology for clients, while also incubating its own ideas. Instead of betting everything on a single product, SunCore’s model gives you a tour through multiple “rooms” of the tech world in your first couple of years: different industries, stacks, and problem types.

Why it’s a strong first job

For juniors and bootcamp grads, the product-studio model can be a smart starting point. You’re working on real projects with real deadlines, but not locked into one domain forever. That breadth means you quickly build a portfolio that spans several products and sectors, which is useful when future hiring managers skim your GitHub or LinkedIn. In Bellevue’s ecosystem, firms like SunCore often fly under the radar compared to big logos, but they show up in broader lists of active software companies on resources like the F6S Bellevue startup directory, which is full of small, execution-heavy teams. Add in a “high-trust” culture and remote-friendly norms, and it can feel like a bridge between solo freelancing and joining a single-product startup.

What you’d actually build

Inside SunCore’s “apartment,” every room is a different project. As a full-stack junior, you might spend one quarter building a modern web app for a healthcare client using React and Node, then pivot to an internal admin tool for a SaaS customer, or a mobile-friendly dashboard for an operations team. You’re likely to work across UI, API design, database modeling, and deployment pipelines in a single year, instead of waiting for someone to “rotate” you. On some client engagements, you’ll integrate AI services - plugging in LLM-based content suggestions, search, or summarization APIs - and learn how to manage latency, cost, and failure modes when models are part of the critical path. That breadth helps you figure out which “room” of the stack you actually want to specialize in later: frontend DX, backend architecture, DevOps, or AI-heavy features.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

On compensation, firms like SunCore Digital usually sit in the mid-range for Bellevue-area juniors, with base salaries often around $95K-$120K. The differentiator is the chance at equity or profit-sharing, especially if the studio spins up its own products alongside client work. When you walk through SunCore as a candidate, ask what percentage of time engineers spend on client projects versus internal initiatives, and how often juniors get to lead features or small client engagements. You’ll also want to check who reviews your PRs, how feedback is delivered when you’re remote, and how they decide which new technologies or AI services to adopt. If the answers show they treat juniors as growing partners rather than task rabbits, that’s a strong sign this low-profile studio could be a surprisingly powerful launchpad for your career.

Belva.ai

Belva.ai is the apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows looking straight into the AI future, even if the lobby is still under construction. It’s a small, early-stage startup in the Bellevue orbit, described in local hiring roundups as a rising AI company focused on web application innovation and “actively hiring developers to lead future project teams.” If you want your first job to be as close as possible to the models themselves - without disappearing into a massive research org at Microsoft or Amazon - this is the kind of place you pay attention to.

Why it’s a strong first job

For juniors who are serious about AI, the biggest draw is proximity: Belva.ai’s whole reason to exist is applying AI to web apps, not just sprinkling a chatbot on the side. That means almost every project touches things like prompt design, LLM orchestration, or AI-assisted user experiences. You also get the kind of fast-track responsibility bigger companies reserve for mid-levels; when a startup says it’s “hiring developers to lead future project teams,” it’s signaling that today’s entry-level engineers are tomorrow’s tech leads if they can grow quickly. In contrast, if you scan big-company new-grad pipelines on sites like Amazon’s Jobs for Grads page, you’ll see extremely structured rotations with narrower scopes - great for stability, less so for immediate ownership.

What you’d actually build

Inside Belva.ai’s “unit,” almost every room is wired to an AI service. As a junior, you might build frontend experiences - chat interfaces, AI-assisted editors, smart dashboards - that sit directly on top of large language models. On the backend, you’d be wiring up services that handle prompt construction, call out to one or more LLM providers, cache and log responses, and feed user feedback back into evaluation pipelines. You’ll quickly learn how to monitor model behavior, measure latency and cost, and put guardrails around outputs so the product is safe and reliable enough for real customers. It’s the kind of exposure that makes later transitions into applied ML, AI tooling, or product engineering around models much easier than if you’d spent two years on non-AI CRUD forms.

Pay, equity, and how to walk through it

On paper, Belva.ai lives in the classic early-stage band: junior base salaries often around $90K-$115K, paired with equity that’s meaningfully larger than what you’d see at a later-stage company. The cash might be lower than a big-tech offer, but your option grant could actually move the needle if the company finds product-market fit. That trade-off is common across early-career tech roles; even internship and new-grad guides on sites like Diversify Tech’s roundup of software and data opportunities emphasize weighing learning and ownership against pure salary. On your walkthrough, be ruthlessly concrete: ask who invested in Belva.ai, how much they’ve raised, and how many months of runway they have at current burn; what percentage of the engineering team is senior enough to mentor; who will review your AI-heavy pull requests; and whether your day-to-day is building actual user-facing AI features or just internal dashboards. If the answers feel specific, transparent, and anchored in real customers - not just vibes - you’ve probably found an early-stage place where the AI room is big, bright, and worth the risk.

How to Choose Your First Bellevue Startup

By the time you’ve toured a few Bellevue apartments and a few Bellevue startups, you realize it’s the same decision in two different outfits. The spreadsheet gets you in the door, but your experience comes down to the rooms you actually live in: who teaches you, what code you ship, how often you’re woken up at 2 a.m., and whether there’s enough “runway” that you’re not wondering if the lights will stay on. Choosing your first startup here isn’t about chasing the hottest logo; it’s about finding the place where you can survive, learn fast, and build a foundation for whatever AI-heavy future you’re aiming at.

Start with the rooms that matter most

Before you click “apply,” decide what you care about more than a fancy kitchen island. For some people, the biggest room is mentorship - having at least one senior engineer whose calendar actually has space for you. For others, it’s AI exposure - sitting close enough to the models that you learn how real products call LLMs, not just how to use a code assistant. There’s also the runway room (can you relax about layoffs for a bit?), the responsibility room (do you own features or just bug tickets?), and the compensation room (can you pay rent without three roommates?). Being explicit about which two or three matter most to you makes it much easier to turn down a glossy option that doesn’t actually fit your life.

A practical checklist for the walkthrough

Once you’re inside an interview loop, stop thinking like a candidate and start thinking like a renter checking water pressure and flushing the toilet. Use a simple checklist for every Bellevue startup you talk to so you can compare apples to apples later:

1. Runway & revenue
   Ask how many months of runway they have at current burn and whether revenue is already covering a meaningful part of expenses. As a rough rule of thumb, 18+ months of runway is comfortable; fewer than 12 months is high risk unless growth is clearly strong.
2. Team growth
   Look up their headcount trend on LinkedIn and how many roles they’re posting across sites. A healthy early-stage team is usually adding engineers steadily, not oscillating between hiring sprees and freezes.
3. Mentorship structure
   Ask who will review your pull requests and how many other juniors are on the team. Green flag: explicit pairing, documented onboarding, and recent examples of juniors getting promoted.
4. AI exposure
   In 2026, most “Software Engineer I” roles expect some fluency with AI tools and APIs. Ask how the team uses AI today and whether you’d work on AI-powered features, not just internal tooling.
5. Real responsibilities
   Request a story about the last feature a new grad shipped end-to-end. If they can’t name one, that’s like an apartment tour where the landlord won’t let you open any closets.

Use Bellevue’s ecosystem to your advantage

The good news is that Bellevue gives you more shots on goal than most cities. You’re in the gravitational field of Microsoft and Amazon, surrounded by Eastside startups that specialize in turning research into shipped product, and you get to keep more of your paycheck thanks to Washington’s lack of state income tax. Beyond the obvious job boards, dig into startup-specific sources: the Y Combinator jobs page for Bellevue is a steady stream of small but well-funded teams, many of which quietly hire sharp juniors before they ever post on LinkedIn. Combine that with local meetups, founder talks, and alumni networks from bootcamps, and you’re no longer just refreshing postings - you’re stepping through doors before the listings go live.

In the end, your spreadsheet will still matter; it’s how you’ll line these companies up side by side and remember who said what. But the real decision happens in the walkthroughs: the questions you ask about mentorship, AI work, and runway, the way engineers talk about their day-to-day, the gut check you do when you close Zoom or walk out of the lobby. Do that a few times, honestly, and you’re not just picking a Bellevue startup. You’re choosing the first place you’ll really grow as an engineer in a city built for people who ship.

Frequently Asked Questions