Doesn't sound like a startup to me. At least it's odd to me there would be "leads" and "managers" at a startup. Startups I've worked for have been fairly flat

Doesn't sound like a startup to me. At least it's odd to me there would be "leads" and "managers" at a startup. Startups I've worked for have been fairly flat structured and typically everyone is trying to do everything all at once. There usually wouldn't be any formal planning or allocation of tasks – there's just things that you need to do as a team of people with difficult skills and abilities. And that's the way it has to be in a startup because you can't afford to have a team of user researchers, UX/UI designers, BAs, devops engineers, frontend devs, backend devs, TAs, etc. Instead you tend to just have a few technical people who have broad experience and are comfortable learning and doing anything that's needed of them. If the company is large enough to have hierarchy and to delegate tasks to certain individuals it's probably structured more like a typical tech company, hence why you're being pigeonholed. I have quite strict opinions on what is and isn't a startup though... It's common these days for tech companies that have been around for years and have hundreds of employees to claim they're a still "small startup". And that's generally why when speaking to recruiters about startup roles my first two questions are how big is the company, and how many devs do they have? More than 3-5 devs and 20 people at the company in total and it starts to become less like a startup and more like your typical software engineering gig.