O-1 visa jobs: which postings mention O-1

The short answer

of postings mention O-1 with visa wording around it (153 of 78,880)

0.19%

postings say the employer sponsors O-1, from 7 employers

31

of O-1 mentions are refusals, not offers (113 of 153)

74%

If you are looking for an O-1 job, searching the posting text for "O-1" will mostly show you where not to apply. Large employers list O-1 in a boilerplate refusal ("no sponsorship for H-1B, L-1, TN, O-1, E-3..."). The offers come almost entirely from small AI startups, and one of them, Exa, accounts for 24 of the 31.

Another 9 postings mention O-1 because the job is to manage immigration cases, such as an immigration program manager or a global mobility lead. Those are jobs about visas, not offers of one. O-1 also rarely appears alone: 149 of the 153 postings also name H-1B, because both sit in the same list.

What the postings say about O-1

The offers are specific. Wordware and PulseRise Technologies say they can sponsor O-1 for strong international candidates, a stealth AI startup lists "O-1 and H-1B sponsorship", and Spring lists "H-1B, O-1, TN". Exa says it is happy to sponsor international candidates, listing O1 next to H1B and OPT. None of these promises a visa, and one adds that O-1 is considered case by case.

All 31 offering postings are in California or New York. 20 have an engineering, research or designer title; the rest are sales, recruiting and marketing roles, mostly at Exa, which puts the same sentence on every posting.

By applicant tracking system

The system matters because it tracks who writes the posting. Workday and Eightfold host big enterprises with legal boilerplate. Ashby and LinkedIn carry the startups that offer.

Greenhouse is the largest system by postings and has the fewest mentions: all 5 are immigration jobs. Amazon, Google, Tesla, Apple and Microsoft careers pages produced none.

By employer

A few employers write most of this. Eaton alone is 74 of the 153, so the headline count tells you more about posting templates than about the market. Counting employers instead: 22 of 2,987 employers (0.7%) mention O-1 at all.

Remove Eaton, Exa and Capital One, which are 75% of the mentions, and 39 postings remain. The conclusion holds: refusals still outnumber offers there, and the 7 remaining offers come from 6 startups.

What we counted

1. O-1 mention: the capitalized text "O-1", "O1", "O-1A" or "O-1B" standing alone (not inside another word), with visa, immigration, sponsor, H-1B, work authorization, petition or a visa type like TN or E-3 within 80 characters.
2. Rules out: the same sentence says no sponsorship, will not support, or not eligible. A posting that says it cannot guarantee a visa while offering one is not a refusal.
3. Offers: a mention that is neither a refusal nor a job about managing immigration.
4. Immigration job: a title containing immigration, mobility, paralegal or people operations, where O-1 appears in the duties.

Lowercase "o1" is excluded on purpose: all 5 postings that use it name OpenAI's o1 model. Two postings use "extraordinary ability" in a work-style sense, not as the visa, and are not counted. We checked a random sample of 10 matches by eye, plus every offering and immigration-role posting.

What to do with this

1. Do not filter job boards on "O-1". Most results are refusals that list it.
2. Look at small AI startups in California and New York first. That is where written offers are.
3. Search for H-1B and "visa sponsorship" too, then ask in the first call whether O-1 is on the table. Employers rarely write it.
4. Read the sentence, not the keyword. "O-1" next to "no sponsorship" is a hard stop for that posting.
5. Have the evidence ready. O-1 is for people with extraordinary ability, so a startup deciding case by case will want publications, press, awards or comparable proof.