🌟 Apply now to meet the founders of Rillet, Basepower, Wisdom AI, and more at our October 15th Founders You Should Know showcase in San Francisco.

The best time to look for your next job is when you don’t need one. When you’re employed, you have maximum leverage: you’re not desperate, you’re not rushing, and you don’t have to take the first offer that comes your way.

This is the beauty of the passive job search. It serves as your low-pressure way to meet the right people, explore new opportunities, and position yourself so that you’re ready when the right role comes along.

But how do you actually find the opportunities worth exploring? More importantly, how do you track key metrics (knowing when they hit product-market fit, when they’re actually hiring, when they’ve scaled from 10 to 100 people) when everything moves so fast?

Here’s what we’ve learned from watching hundreds of engineers and operators in our community conduct strategic passive job searches.

The passive job search is about planting seeds now so they bloom into opportunities later.

Engage in curious conversations

A passive job search gives you a huge gift: time. Without the pressure to land an offer quickly, you can explore freely and find companies that truly excite you. You can afford to be curious, peeking into industries and opportunities you’d normally overlook under the pressure of switching healthcare providers or negotiating your salary.

The best way to explore what’s out there is simply talking to people. Chances are, while you’ve been heads-down in your current role, you’ve developed tunnel vision. Your company’s tech stack becomes “the way things are done”, your team’s priorities feel like universal truths, and you lose sight of how rapidly things are evolving elsewhere. Conversations with people outside your immediate bubble — colleagues that have moved on, friends at different companies, people you meet at tech events — can expose you to approaches and avenues you’d never consider otherwise.

We hear nuggets of these conversations all the time. Things like:

“I’ve been reading a lot about DSPy and how to build better modular AI software. Definitely an interesting topic if you want to explore that space”

“Have you seen what they’re building at Boom Aerospace? You should check them out…if I wasn’t trying to build my own devtools startup, I’d probably be gunning to work there”

These insights can nudge you in the right direction towards startups and technical topics you might have not explored otherwise.

The key here is to approach these conversations with genuine curiosity. What are you interested in learning from conversations with other engineers, former colleagues, and friends of friends? What inspires you about the work that they do? What new tools are they excited about that you want to learn how to use? When you pursue these conversations based on your true interests, these people can provide the best candid advice on what might be the best next step for you.

If you want to kickstart these conversations but aren’t sure where to begin, our community of engineers, founders, and operators is a great place to start. We’ve helped many engineers connect with other engineers and founders who’ve sparked conversations that turned into meaningful opportunities, and we’d love to help you do the same.

Cultivate your personal online brand

When someone Googles you — whether to learn more about a conversation you’re having or to consider you for a potential opportunity — you want your online presence to represent who you are today, not who you were three years ago. Casual conversations might open the door for you, but your online presence is often what people will refer back to or send to others when considering you for a position or referral. Your online presence needs to work for you even when you’re not actively looking.

Start with the most common touch point: Linkedin. Make sure your profile is current, complete, and reflects what you want to do and what you’re good at. “Software Engineer at random Series B company” communicates almost nothing. What did you actually do? What problem did you solve internally? What tools did you build with? You don’t need an entire novella in your Linkedin descriptions, but providing a sentence or two of context can go a long way, and save you a lot of explaining yourself.

Beyond LinkedIn, consider other ways people might encounter you online: GitHub projects, a personal website, or even contributions to blogs or open-source communities. Showcase your work where it naturally lives, and keep those spaces updated.

If you’ve shipped something you’re proud of (and can publicly share), make sure it’s easy to find and accessible. Whether it’s a portfolio, a project write-up, or a GitHub repo, make sure it reflects the quality and scope of your work.

TL;DR — your online presence is your passive sales pitch. Someone should want to talk to you without you having to lift a finger.

Attend events to meet founders (like Founders You Should Know)

Talking directly to founders about what they’re building is one of the most valuable ways to figure out if an opportunity is right for you. A job posting or company website gives you the polished marketing version. Meeting a founder one-on-one lets you ask the hard questions and get direct answers about where they actually are in their growth journey. Revenue data, customer traction, runway, team size—this information is hard, if not impossible, to find online, especially for early-stage companies. Learning that a startup recently closed a major customer or tripled its revenue can be an early sign you’ve found a great place to work, and you’re most likely to hear about these milestones first when they come directly from the founder in a trusted environment.

At Founders You Should Know, each founder shares these details openly and transparently. Beyond the numbers, you get something equally important: a real sense of their leadership style, their technical depth, how they think through their startup’s longterm challenges, and whether this is someone you’d genuinely want to work with. These conversations give you the signal you need to make an informed decision, not just a spur-of-the-moment one.

Our event is intentionally not a career fair; you don’t show up with resumes in hand and expect to leave with a job offer. We know that the best engineers and operators take their time, and our objective is that everyone leaves with at least one topic or company they’re excited about. You might need six months of conversations, of learning what’s out there and what resonates with you, before you’re ready to make a move. That’s not just okay, it’s smart. This is also why your information is never shared with founders unless you actively opt in, so you can explore freely without the pressure of being “officially in-market.” We optimize for low-pressure, high-signal conversations that lead to great matches, so you can make sure you find your perfect fit.

On October 15th, we’ll be featuring the founders of Basepower, Rillet, Exa, and 7 other inflecting startups in San Francisco. If you’re looking around for your next opportunity, don’t miss your chance to meet these 10 founders face-to-face and hear what they’re building. Apply now to attend.

Keeping your options open