Product Engineer

Y Combinator is run by a small team that is committed to helping founders start the next Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, or Doordash.  We work out of the same campus in San Francisco that we run the batch in.  We also operate according to the same principles we teach our startups - so if you've read Paul Graham's essays or watched our videos on YouTube, you can already predict what it would be like to work here.  

Working at YC places you in the center of the startup world.

About the role

To manage our operations at scale, we write lots of software for YC itself. One aspect of this is building internal tools to help run YC itself more efficiently. For this team, our users are YC employees – Group Partners who need productivity tools to engage 1000s of companies, finance teams that need to process investment documents at scale, and a legal team that supports every kind of startup legal issue imaginable. 

In this role, you will:

• Design and build out new features in entirety. Our particular team focuses on helping founders after the batch, including event software and engagement tools to help YC keep in touch with companies well after they go through the YC program. 

• Work alongside YC Partners to build productivity software. We’ve built Gmail plugins and company dashboards for partners to quickly engage founders who email/ Slack them regularly.

• Scope and prioritize the roadmap. We make trade-offs of effort and impact every day, and engineers help us decide what’s most urgent and important to build next. 

• Analyze usage and engagement. We want to understand what’s working/not working, and we focus on how continuous improvement over long periods of time can have huge outcomes over months or years. 

About the team

Our whole software team is only 15 full-stack product engineers, and we enjoy working in a small team with high impact and knowing each other by name. We have a broad range of experiences from bigger companies like Meta and Google, and many of us have started startups ourselves. 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. 

Lastly: 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. 

Location: 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 optimal for you to be here with them. You must live in the SF Bay Area or be willing to relocate.  We offer generous relocation support for those who want to move to SF to work here.

Compensation: $250K to $500K base salary, depending on experience. YC has a profit-sharing program, which is comparable to equity in an early-stage startup or carry in a VC fund.

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: Y Combinator is willing to sponsor certain employment visas in accordance with company policy.

Legal note: 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 privacy policy of Ashby, Inc., the hiring platform used by Y Combinator, governs the collection of such data and can be found here.