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Startup salaries and equity, as data: exporting Wellfound (AngelList) jobs

#startup #data #career #webscraping

Wellfound (formerly AngelList Talent) is unusual among job boards: most listings show both a salary range and an equity range, plus the company's funding stage, size and investor badges. That makes it the best public dataset on startup compensation, if you can get it out of the website.

Where the data lives

Wellfound is a Next.js app. Each search page (/role/software-engineer, /location/berlin, /remote) ships its data in a <script id="__NEXT_DATA__"> tag as an Apollo cache. The useful records are:

  • JobListingSearchResult: title, compensation (a display string like $120k – $160k • 0.1% – 0.5%), jobType, remote, locationNames, yearsExperienceMin, liveStartAt, and a reference to the startup.
  • StartupResult: name, companySize, highConcept (one-liner), and badges[] such as Actively hiring, Top investors, B2B and the funding stage.

The job detail page adds a schema.org JobPosting block in ld+json. It has the company website, industry, benefits, directApply, applicant location requirements and a structured baseSalary with its unit (year/month/hour).

The annoying parts

  1. Compensation is a string. You need to parse $120k – $160k, €50K – €70K, ₹15L – ₹25L and 0.1% – 1.0% into min/max numbers and currencies. Watch out for k, m and Indian lakh (L) multipliers.
  2. Pagination stops around page 46, so a broad query like "software engineer" doesn't return everything. Split by role and location.
  3. Detail pages cost requests. You only need them for the website, industry and salary period, so fetch them in parallel with a small concurrency limit.
  4. Daily feeds. If you run this every morning, you want only new jobs. Keep a hash of each job's key fields between runs.

What you can do with it

  • Comp benchmarking: median salary and equity for a senior engineer at a seed-stage vs. Series B company.
  • Job hunting at scale: filter all remote jobs by minimum salary, then sort by equity.
  • Lead lists: seed-stage startups that are actively hiring are startups that just raised money. Recruiters, agencies and dev shops sell to them.
  • Job boards and newsletters: a daily feed of new remote startup jobs.

The shortcut

I packaged all of the above as Wellfound Jobs Scraper on Apify. It returns salary and equity as numbers, plus company website, industry, stage, size, investor badges and remote policy. It has filters (minimum salary, equity only, company stage, years of experience) and a "new jobs only" mode for daily schedules. Pricing is pay per result, $0.90 per 1,000 jobs.

Some ready-made searches:

From an AI agent: add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=gleanery_actors/wellfound-jobs-scraper as an MCP server in Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT, and ask "Find 20 remote seed-stage startups hiring ML engineers that offer equity, with their websites." (setup guide)

If you do a compensation analysis with it, I'd love to see the charts.

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