YC is hiring Product Engineers to build the future of YC -- and increasingly, software for startups everywhere.
We're a team of ~20 engineers building everything from Work at a Startup and Demo Day to investor software, founder tools, AI systems, and new open source projects. We don't have PMs. Engineers talk to users, decide what to build, and ship quickly.
Some of what we've been building:
* New products: GStack rethinks the software stack for an AI-native world. GBrain explores persistent memory and knowledge systems for AI. Paxel and other AI-powered products help founders—and increasingly everyone else -- build software and companies faster.
* Products at scale: We build and operate Work at a Startup (2M+ candidates, 1000s of early startups), Demo Day, our investor marketplace, SAFE signing, founder CRM, and the software that powers YC itself.
* Data: YC has over 20 years of proprietary startup data. We're applying it to how we think about the future of YC's batch, fundraising tools, hiring, recommendations, and entirely new ways to help people start and grow successful companies.
AI has fundamentally changed how we build software, and we're looking for engineers who are already experimenting with coding agents, MCP, LLMs, context engineering, evals, developer tooling, and whatever comes next. Our stack includes Rails, React, Postgres, Python, TypeScript, LLM APIs, and plenty of experimental infrastructure, but we're much more interested in great builders than expertise in any particular framework.
We're in person in San Francisco (Dogpatch). You'll work closely with founders and alongside people like Garry, Jared and Diana, helping define how YC—and startups more broadly—build software in the AI era.
We offer competitive compensation, carry in the YC fund, and a small, high-autonomy engineering team.
Y Combinator | Product Engineers on YC's own team | San Francisco | Full Time | $185K-$485K
I'm Ryan, an EM and engineer here at YC. We have a small, 18-person software team with no PMs -- engineers own everything end-to-end.
We build the software behind YC's $6B in investments: tools that help partners evaluate thousands of startups per batch, AI-powered apps that founders use every day, and platforms like Work at a Startup that connect candidates with YC companies. Engineers get unlimited AI tokens -- both for development and to build AI-powered products. What wouldn't you build to help founders + YC with that much firepower?
What makes this different from other roles:
* You'd learn more about startups here than you could possibly imagine. Every batch brings hundreds of founders building things across every industry, and you're right in the middle of it.
* We attend Demo Day, founder dinners, and work directly with partners and many of the companies. (They make great products!)
* We pay well, offer carry in the fund (like equity), and provide generous relocation support if you're not in SF yet.
Two roles open:
* Product Engineer -- full-stack, own the product lifecycle. Rails/React stack. Build tools that power how YC invests in and supports startups. It's a wide range, and sometimes it feels like labs-like work, other times it feels like a supersuit to power founders and our Partners like Garry and Jared.
* Community Builder and Software Engineer -- hybrid role. Run YC's talent-facing programs (meetups, tech talks, career expos) AND build the software that makes them scale. You need to be a great engineer and LOVE to build and support communities.
Checkout more about the roles, and email me directly if you're excited to learn more about startups than you will anywhere else - [email protected]
YC has been building ever-more ambitious software for founders to succeed -- since Garry returned. In the last year, our team delivered:
* Safe tools that has processed $1B+ in seed funding in last 4 batches
* Fundraising CRM for founders manage their fundraise -- used by all founders
* Work at a Startup has 1M+ candidates on it, with 1000s of hires/year
There are ton of ways we see YC Software benefitting our alumni and investors -- and we want founder/founding engineer minded people to drive each into standalone products.
Yet in reality, we're a team of 14 full-stack product engineers, the company is 85 people, and we intend to stay small and scrappy. I was the 7th engineer at salesforce and loved the early stage, and we get to be that way at YC... indefinitely.
YC is also knee-deep in applying AI tools and techniques across all of our product surface areas, and investor-focused work is no exception. We’re happy to share more when we chat in person.
We also want to work with people who love building full stack web apps. While our stack is Rails, React and Postgres, mostly we’re just a bunch of pragmatic builders who are excited about shipping and having impact.
Two roles are posted below: Investor Software and Post Batch (all SW after the batch).
If you're interested, read more below and email me directy with what you'd be excited to build here: [email protected].
Y Combinator Job Expo, June 6th 2022 | Engineering, Product, Design | Virtual
Y Combinator is hosting our Summer Job Expo online on Wednesday, June 8th, 4 pm PT. This is a way to meet the latest batch of founders from YC startups (W22 & S21) and learn about open roles in engineering, product and design.
We’ve vetted these startups to make sure they’re in a good position to hire -- in terms of funding, strong teams, and impactful products to work on. Some notable startups:
- Epsilon3: Former SpaceX and Google engineers building the OS for spacecraft & operations.
- Sieve: AI infrastructure & APIs for developers to process and understand visual data, from former Scale/NVIDA engineers.
- Kalshi: First-ever legal futures exchange for trading on anything from Lil Nas X to climate change.
- Kable: Former Hulu billing PM/engineer building a usage-based billing platform.
- AstroForge: Mining astroids.
The expo is an efficient way to meet a number of great startups all at once, and not have to seek them out yourself. We start the event with rapid pitches by founders -- like Demo Day, but for engineers instead of investors -- to help you quickly survey the companies. After the pitches, we open up a virtual expo hall to give you a chance to meet founders and early employees, learn more about the domain and technology, and hear about open roles.
Despite the uncertainty in the broader market, we're seeing a lot of early stage startups being well-capitalized, with $2-5M seed rounds. (Some startups in attendance have recently closed a significantly larger round, including Searchlight, Kalshi and Portal.) All startups are hiring selectively to make sure they have a long runway and impactful product roadmap. Almost all of the companies are hiring for US-remote, with a few are back in-person.
We've got room for about 40 startups to present. So if you have other industries or types of startups you’re excited about, let us know and we’ll do our best to find some and invite them to join us.
If you're open next week and want a fun, informative and efficient evening of learning about new tech and open roles, please join us:
YC is hiring Product Engineers to build the future of YC -- and increasingly, software for startups everywhere.
We're a team of ~20 engineers building everything from Work at a Startup and Demo Day to investor software, founder tools, AI systems, and new open source projects. We don't have PMs. Engineers talk to users, decide what to build, and ship quickly.
Some of what we've been building:
* New products: GStack rethinks the software stack for an AI-native world. GBrain explores persistent memory and knowledge systems for AI. Paxel and other AI-powered products help founders—and increasingly everyone else -- build software and companies faster.
* Products at scale: We build and operate Work at a Startup (2M+ candidates, 1000s of early startups), Demo Day, our investor marketplace, SAFE signing, founder CRM, and the software that powers YC itself.
* Data: YC has over 20 years of proprietary startup data. We're applying it to how we think about the future of YC's batch, fundraising tools, hiring, recommendations, and entirely new ways to help people start and grow successful companies.
AI has fundamentally changed how we build software, and we're looking for engineers who are already experimenting with coding agents, MCP, LLMs, context engineering, evals, developer tooling, and whatever comes next. Our stack includes Rails, React, Postgres, Python, TypeScript, LLM APIs, and plenty of experimental infrastructure, but we're much more interested in great builders than expertise in any particular framework.
We're in person in San Francisco (Dogpatch). You'll work closely with founders and alongside people like Garry, Jared and Diana, helping define how YC—and startups more broadly—build software in the AI era.
We offer competitive compensation, carry in the YC fund, and a small, high-autonomy engineering team.
Learn more about the team and role at https://www.ycombinator.com/software. If this sounds exciting, I'd love to chat -- email me directly at [email protected].