I'm getting bummed out with my Silicon Valley tech startup. The business side is going smoothly, but the engineering side is boring me to death. We started off with some cool new technologies, but since then we've constantly been hacking in incremental features and accruing technical debt. I don't see much point in what I'm doing, and I feel like my skills and credentials are going to waste. What scares me most about this is it could be the story of any startup!

Thus I ask you, Hacker News, where are the interesting tech jobs?

I'm looking for something that hearkens back to the better part of my many years in graduate school (intellectually curious open-minded colleagues, the opportunity to work on something new, and the time to do it right), but applied to real problems of known importance, not just whatever my 25-year-old self thought sounded impressive enough to publish.