Where the Startup Jobs in Waterloo Region Are

This fall I sent out about 150 job applications and got two or three interviews out of them, so I wasn't surprised when I saw that the jobs page on Builderloo had more views than the homepage last month. Unemployment in Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo was 8.2% in August, against 6.4% for Canada and 6.8% for Toronto.

I built that page, and I still couldn't have told you who is hiring here. Builderloo checks the job boards of 287 listed startups every day and has been collecting what it finds since June, so on November 4 I went through all of it.

921different roles posted since June
415open on November 4
96of those name a town in the Region
23startups with a role open here

These are only the startups on Builderloo, including some older companies like Magnet Forensics and Miovision. Big employers aren't in this data, so this is a look at the startups and not the whole job market.

Those 96 roles aren't spread out evenly. Half of them are at five companies.

BinSentry14
Planitar12
Magnet Forensics10
Encircle7
Voltera7
Avidbots6
Ground News5
Miovision4

The startups with the most open roles here
BinSentryPlanitarMagnet ForensicsEncircleVoltera Inc.AvidbotsGround NewsMiovision

Kitchener

The one that made me smile is BinSentry. Randall Schwartzentruber and Nathan Hoel started it in 2017, and the company's own story says farm workers were throwing rocks at feed bins and listening to the sound to work out if they were full. BinSentry makes the sensor that replaces the rock! It has posted 32 different roles here since June, more than any other startup on Builderloo, and 14 are open now, from software developers to an electronic assembler.

Avidbots has 6 roles open here, from a field service technician to a senior hardware developer. Ground News has 5, mostly senior engineers, and I love that Harleen Kaur said at Techtoberfest it's usually the number one app in its category in the US, and they're hiring in Kitchener. Miovision has 4, and Kurtis McBride told Communitech that when he couldn't find enough Canadian customers early on, he started calling the US from Kitchener.

Waterloo

Waterloo has the most startup roles, with 47 naming the city. Planitar has 12. Alex Likholyot and Kevin Klages started iGUIDE, the 3D tours and floor plans you see on house listings, with agents here in KW.

Magnet Forensics has 10, and it might be my favourite story on this list. Jad Saliba was a Waterloo Regional Police officer who spent his evenings and weekends building a tool to recover evidence from computers, and that tool became the company. Voltera has 7. Four UW grads started it, and in 2015 they were the first Canadians to win the James Dyson Award, for a machine that prints circuit boards.

Smaller teams are hiring too. softwareQ, Sidian and eleven-x each have 3 roles open, including a quantum software engineer at softwareQ.

Cambridge

Builderloo has 2 open roles in Cambridge right now, at Smarter Alloys. The best thing I found there was from June, when MealSuite put up seven co-op jobs at once, in software, data, marketing, customer experience and people and culture. Those have closed now, so I'd check back before the next co-op term.

You don't have to work in the Region

Another 82 of the open roles are remote in Canada, so those are the ones you could do from your couch in Kitchener. Another 95 don't say where they are, so I'd ask.

A town in the Region96
Remote in Canada82
Other cities94
Remote outside Canada48
No place given95

What they're hiring for

I sorted the 96 local roles by their titles, so a few will be in the wrong group. Software and data is the biggest group, but it's less than a third, and I was surprised by how much hardware there is. Almost one in four roles is in hardware, engineering or science, at companies like Avidbots, Voltera and BinSentry that build robots, circuit board printers and sensors.

Software and data30
Hardware, engineering and science22
Sales, marketing and customers18
Finance, people and operations11
Product, design and projects10
Students3
Factory and production2

This next part matches how my own search went. Half of the local roles have a title like senior, staff, lead, manager or director, and 11 are marked junior or entry level. They do exist, like BinSentry's software developer roles at $70,000 to $90,000 and Voltera's applications technician role at $58,000 to $65,000. Across the 74 local roles with a yearly salary listed since June, the middle of the range is about $101,000, and I can only show you that because Ontario made employers with 25 or more staff post pay in January.

If you're new to Canada, the same rules stop those employers from asking for Canadian experience in a posting. That only covers the posting, and I didn't count which roles are open to someone on a work permit, so I'd ask about that early.

Students

There are 3 local student roles open right now, at softwareQ, Planitar and Audesse, and Planitar's co-op lists $18 to $23 an hour. That's a small part of what's out there for you. UW says it had more than 23,800 co-op work terms in 2025, and a lot of those go through WaterlooWorks. If you're at UW, Laurier or Conestoga, your own co-op office will have way more than I found.

The startup postings do show how early these go up. Magnet posted its Fall 2026 co-ops in April, and winter 2027 co-ops started showing up in late September.

What happens after a raise

I started all of this wanting to know if a startup raising money means it's about to hire. I found 10 listed startups with a raise in the news since April, which is too few to give you a rule, but I can tell you about three of them.

Scispot announced an $8 million USD Series A on June 4 and told BetaKit it would add AI engineers and scientists to its team of about 30. When Builderloo started collecting jobs 16 days later it already had 8 roles up, and the 7 open today include a junior AI automation engineer and a field application scientist, which is what it said it would do. Float announced its $85 million CAD Series C on June 24, led by Inovia with Garage Capital in it too, and has posted 41 roles since July, nearly all of them remote, so you could do those from here. Hive announced its round in October, so it's too soon to tell.

Some small teams don't post at all. Astrus's careers page just tells you who to reach out to, and I love that. If I was looking again, I'd treat every raise in The Weekly as a reason to write to a founder.

When to look

Roles go up on weekdays, and Tuesday to Thursday are a little busier than Monday and Friday. Of the roles that came down since June, half came down within 27 days of Builderloo first finding them, so I'd check every week. I'd love to tell you which months are best, but Builderloo only started collecting jobs in June, so ask me again next year.

If you're hiring here and I missed you, or you found your job in a way these boards would never show, I'd love to hear the story. You can reach me on the contact page.