Product Engineer

Y Combinator is run by a small team that is committed to helping founders build their startup and make it take off like the next Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit or Doordash (all companies that previously went through YC).

While YC is primarily known for its batch program for founders, what’s lesser known is that we have our own small‑but‑mighty software team. We build tools to help run YC, as well as to help our founders have an unfair advantage — through our unparalleled founder network, expert advice from YC General Partners, exclusive funding opportunities, and much more.

Working at YC is a unique place to operate like a startup – talking to customers and shipping code rapidly – and also be surrounded and learning at the frontier of the new startup world.

While the software team itself is very small (~15 people), the impact of our software for our founders and for YC itself is quite massive. Some examples of the software you’d get to work on:

• YC’s application software. Every batch, we review over 20K applicants, manage interviews with thousands of founders, and select just over 100 companies – all within 3 weeks. To accomplish this feat, we write serious power tools to help partners like Garry and Harj manage the process and make decisions, and we’re constantly working to make the software better.
• Founder fundraising software. We’ve built the most critical tools for founders to raise a successful seed round: a leads pipeline from Demo Day, legal tools to execute YC safes, and an all‑in‑one CRM to manage investor relations. Founders regularly tell us that this is the best part of YC.
• Investment software. YC manages over $6B in our fund, and we write software to help us manage it end‑to‑end: how to invest it, know where it’s allocated, and even use AI to keep our records up‑to‑date with what founders need from us.
• Hiring platform. We’ve built a job marketplace with over 2M job seekers for founders to engage, as well a full suite of messaging and AI‑assisted recruiting tools to help founders find great people and hire faster.

And despite all of this, we still feel like we’re just getting started. We have a lot of great ideas on every front to improve how YC operates and to bring tremendous value to our startups, and many of them are 🤫.

As a company, we largely abide by the same principles we teach our startups – so if you’ve read Paul Graham’s essays or watched our videos on You Tube, you can already predict what it would be like to work here.

Many of our software teammates have worked at or started startups themselves, while also having experience from bigger companies like Meta and Google. This tends to be a good balance to know how to ship quickly, but also make strong product and technical decisions that don’t leave us with dead ends. True to YC advice, our product engineers talk to our customers regularly and ship fast.

We also define our own roadmap and often design our own products when needed.

Our stack is pretty straightforward (Rails, React, Postgres), and the last three engineers have learned it on the job. That said, we’ve found that enjoying front‑end software development is key to being successful here, so it’s almost a requirement for the role. Our needs as an organization require a large degree of flexibility, and people change teams quite often.

More and more, our founders are introducing AI in all they do – how they code, how their product works, and how they streamline their own operations. At YC, we’re similarly pushing the boundaries of how AI can improve our software and help our companies. We’re excited to share more in person – so please take a moment to apply. ;

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If you’re interested in starting your own startup one day: eight former engineers on our team have gone on to start YC‑funded startups. If you want to start your own startup someday but aren’t ready to do it now, working at YC could be an excellent way to get there, provided you’re willing to be here for at least 2‑3 years.

This is an in‑person role at YC’s campus in Dogpatch, San Francisco. This is where our users (founders, partners, and employees) are five days a week, so it’s…