Y Combinator has a small ~12 person team that makes the software that runs YC. Hardly any investors write software, but YC was started by programmers so it's natural for us to solve our problems that way. We believe our software is a key competitive advantage and we are investing aggressively in new software products.
As a member of the software team, you'll get full access to the YC program, just like founders do. You'll learn the ins and outs of how YC works, and you'll get to follow and learn from hundreds of companies. You'll meet some of the most successful people in the startup world and get exposed to the best startup ideas. And of course, if you ever want to start your own company, you’ll learn a lot about that from working at YC.
Skills: JavaScript, React, SCSS, TypeScript, Ruby on Rails, SQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Y Combinator is best known for our accelerator batch program, which has helped companies like Airbnb, Stripe and Instacart get started. What is lesser known are the resources that YC provides after the batch -- our YC-only hiring platform (workatastartup.com), regular event planning for alumni founders, and internal software platform for helping founders stay in touch. Our scope keeps increasing, and we’re now looking to bring on a Product Engineer to help us scale our impact even more.
You’ll be working directly with a small software team full of kind people who are eager to help you get up-to-speed. You’ll be relied upon not only to help us tackle our hefty roadmap, but to also explore how YC can leverage its unique structural advantages to help our founders hire great people and build their companies after the batch ends.
In this role, you will:
- Design and build out new features in entirety. Our particular team focuses on helping founders post-batch. This is a range of features/products, with a focus on 1.) workatastartup.com (hiring) and 2.) internal software (helping YC stay in touch with founders and YC alumni).
- Scope and prioritize items on our post-batch roadmap alongside YC partners and others on the YC software team.
- Analyze usage and engagement from both founders, job-seekers and other users to understand what’s working/not working, and make things continuously better.
YC is small: the whole company is only 85 people, and our software team makes up 15. We prefer having a small, tight knit crew in which we trust each product engineer to have a ton of autonomy and use their good judgement on what to build — and to build it fast.
Most of our teammates are former founders of founding engineers — we’ve found this tracks to the type of ownership and product-focused approach to our work. You’ll work alongside and learn from a pretty low-ego, impressive crew: the 10th employee at Carta, the 7th engineer at Salesforce, the engineer who built the Facebook Feed, and many former YC founders. (And that’s not even mentioning the Group Partners like Garry and Harj.)
We operate like a startup: our roadmaps evolve very organically, we ship new products and experiment constantly, and we try to be as intellectually honest about what’s working and what’s not working. We look for kind, low-ego collaborative people because we’re all contributing to a monolith codebase — and we and we’re eager to help out wherever we can — to help the founders, our Group Partners, or contribute to new parts of the code that we’ve never touched before.
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're looking to work with people who generally impress us. If you've written some impressive software before, whether for yourself or a company, we want to hear about it: what made it technically challenging, why it was hard to get people to use it, and what it took to get it over the finish line.
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. We also talk to customers regularly, whether it’s founders or investors or even our fellow employees. So engineers who have sought out product + engineering roles in the past are the best fit and have the most fun here.
We’re also looking for people who are optimistic about what technology has in store for our future. Our overarching goal is to support founders who all want to use software, AI and technology as their means to improve how we work and live. And we’re here to do what we can to help them.
Lastly, the software team has a lot of individual responsibility and access to sensitive information, so we need to hire people we can trust. Your ability to make good trade-offs and exercise good judgement is particularly important to us.
Location: YC is headquartered in San Francisco and we’re looking for people who either live in the SF Bay Area or are willing to relocate. We are mostly in-office because we like being in-person and hanging out; we have reasonable flexibility with WFH on a case-by-case basis.
Compensation: $185K to $300K base salary, depending on experience. We also offer carry in the YC fund, which offers potential upside in the YC investment fund. (It would be the investment equivalent of upside at a startup.)
Benefits: Our full benefits package includes medical, vision, and dental plans, infertility benefit, STD/LTD, life insurance, commuter benefits, flexible spending account, health savings account, 401(k) + 4% matching, generous parental leave, paid holidays and flexible paid time off policy.
Work Authorization: Employer is willing to sponsor certain employment visas in accordance with company policy.
Y Combinator considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law including San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance. Y Combinator is committed to protecting the privacy of the personal information of job applicants and complying with the California Consumer Privacy Act.
The YC internal software is mostly written in Ruby on Rails and React. It runs on AWS and PostgreSQL. Previous experience developing web apps will be helpful, but we don't care if you've used React or Rails specifically.
Note: Hacker News is written in Lisp, but Hacker News is run by a separate team.