Senior recruiting in Austin, Texas.
Austin is Uplyft Talent's U.S. operations base. We work with Austin-headquartered scale-ups, Oracle / Tesla / Dell post-relocation enterprises, remote-first companies with strong Austin benches, and operator businesses building Texas executive teams.
The Austin market, honestly.
Austin's senior market has evolved from a secondary tech market to a primary one — and increasingly, a full-executive market — over the last decade. On the tech side, the concentration of senior engineers around Google, Indeed, Atlassian, Cloudflare, and a fast-growing set of AI-native scale-ups makes it a viable alternative to San Francisco. Beyond tech, the post-2020 headquarters relocations (Tesla, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Indeed) brought executive and finance talent to the city en masse. Austin compensation bands run ~10–15% below SF but above national average across most functions.
What you need to know about hiring here.
- U.S. operations base — direct in-city sourcing across all functions
- Strong AI and SaaS scale-up network (Chief, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Canva alumni)
- Post-relocation executive pool (Tesla, Oracle, HPE, Indeed senior leadership in the city)
- University of Texas at Austin senior alumni network across engineering, business, and finance
- Growing CFO and VP Finance bench driven by scale-up IPO pipeline
- Time-zone coverage across the U.S. (CT is workable with both coasts)
Top senior roles in Austin.
- Senior / Staff Backend Engineer
- Senior ML Engineer
- Platform / SRE Engineer
- VP Engineering / CTO
- CFO / VP Finance (scale-up and pre-IPO)
- VP Sales / CRO
- CMO / VP Marketing
- COO / VP Operations
Real salary bands.
- Senior Backend Engineer
- USD $170K–$260K + equity
- Staff Engineer
- USD $270K–$470K + equity
- Senior ML Engineer
- USD $190K–$320K + equity
- VP Engineering
- USD $380K–$720K + meaningful equity
- CFO
- USD $380K–$800K + meaningful equity
- VP Sales / CRO
- USD $360K–$680K OTE + equity
Austin hiring — questions we hear.
For most Series A–D companies with a remote-first culture, Austin produces comparable senior talent at meaningfully lower total-comp burn. The tradeoff is the candidate pool is shallower than SF for extremely specialized senior roles (frontier ML research, deep systems ICs). We'll tell you at intake whether Austin alone is enough for your search or if we should expand.