Y Combinator

Build polished, thoughtful product experiences at YC Y Combinator builds the software that runs YC — internal tools used by partners and founders, public products used by the broader startup ecosystem, and AI-powered systems that automate complex workflows. Our team is small, the impact is large, and we ship real product to real users frequently. We’re looking for a Software Product Design Engineer — someone who lives at the intersection of design and engineering. You’ll design beautiful user experiences, translate high-fidelity mocks into production code, and proactively elevate existing interfaces with thoughtful detail and interactions. What you’ll do Design compelling, clear UI/UX and produce high-quality mocks that demonstrate strong product taste. Turn design mocks (yours or others’) into pixel-perfect , production-ready frontends using modern web tech. Iterate on existing interfaces by improving layout, interaction quality, motion, and design consistency. Work closely with engineers, partners, and stakeholders — you’ll own the design and implementation of features end-to-end. Rapidly prototype and “vibe code” to explore ideas, gather feedback, and iterate quickly. Contribute to design systems, component libraries, and patterns that raise the bar for frontend quality across YC. Stay close to users: talk to them, watch how they use the product, and improve the experience based on real signals. What we’re looking for Strong UX and visual design skills with proven taste and craftsmanship. Frontend engineering experience — comfort building real UI in React, TypeScript, and modern CSS. Ability to move fluidly between design tools (Figma, etc.) and frontend code. A “get things done” mindset: you ship quickly, iterate based on feedback, and take ownership. Someone who cares deeply about polish — from typography and spacing to micro-interactions and transitions. Comfort with ambiguity: you’ll often define your own scope and drive things forward with little direction. Nice to have Experience building or maintaining design systems. Contributions to open source UI libraries or design resources. Background in internal tools, admin dashboards, or developer-facing products. Why this role at YC At YC, engineers own projects end-to-end — from the early sketches and prototypes to deployed code used by partners, investors, and founders. We work on a small, tight-knit team where your decisions matter, and you’ll ship real product quickly, often interacting directly with users. You’ll also be plugged into the heartbeat of the startup ecosystem, surrounded by founders and builders working on the hardest problems. This is a unique opportunity to combine design taste, frontend craftsmanship, and real product impact in a role with broad autonomy and high visibility. 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: $185K to $485K 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

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. Who we are 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. What are we looking for 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 a

Note: For this role, we are asking you to record a video about your past experience with startups, programs and community management — share whatever you think is relevant for success in this role. Please aim for no more than 2 minutes, and share the private Youtube URL in your application/message. This is a hybrid builder role focused on growing and scaling YC’s talent ecosystem through both community-building and software. You’ll design and run high-quality programs and events that connect exceptional people with YC startups — and you’ll also build the tools, systems, and AI-powered workflows that make those efforts scalable. This is not a traditional events role. You’re not just organizing — you’re engineering systems around communities. If you’re someone who enjoys bringing people together and writing code to amplify that impact, this is a uniquely high-leverage role. TL;DR You build communities and the software that powers them You’ll work directly with founders, developers, and talent across the YC ecosystem You’ll improve and extend YC tools (like Work at a Startup) You’ll use AI to scale community engagement and hiring outcomes You thrive in ambiguity and take ownership end-to-end About the Team & Product Y Combinator runs Work at a Startup (workatastartup.com), a platform that connects exceptional candidates with YC startups. YC also operates a wide range of programs — events, conferences, and partnerships — that serve as the top-of-funnel engine for talent into the ecosystem. This role sits at the intersection of both: Community → bringing the right people together Software → building systems that scale that connection What You’ll Do Community Building & Events Own and run YC’s talent-facing programs: meetups, tech talks, career expos, and more Design high-quality in-person and online experiences that connect founders and candidates Build relationships across universities, developer communities, and emerging talent networks Grow and nurture communities around YC — both online and offline Act as a strong external representative of YC Events Engineering & Internal Tools Build tools and systems to manage, scale, and improve events and community engagement Contribute code to YC’s internal codebase (including Work at a Startup) Automate workflows around candidate discovery, event ops, and follow-ups Use AI to improve matching, personalization, and engagement across the ecosystem Prototype quickly — from scrappy scripts to production features Ecosystem & Platform Strategy Identify bottlenecks in how talent flows into YC startups and build solutions Combine programs + software to create scalable, repeatable systems Use data to measure what works and continuously improve outcomes Expand YC’s reach into new talent pools and communities What We’re Looking For Must-Haves Strong coding ability — you’re comfortable building real tools and shipping code Evidence of building projects, products, or meaningful side projects Ability to operate as both a builder and community leader Strong communication and interpersonal skills High agency — you take ownership without waiting for direction Comfort working in ambiguity and moving quickly Nice-to-Haves Experience running events, communities, or programs Experience with developer communities or university ecosystems Familiarity with AI tools and interest in applying them to real-world workflows Experience in or strong interest in startups Who Thrives Here Builders who want to have impact beyond a single product People who enjoy both people and systems Individuals who combine technical ability with strong taste and judgment Those excited about shaping how communities and talent networks scale Why This Role Is Unique You’ll build software and run programs — not just one or the other You’ll have access to YC’s internal tools and can directly improve them You’ll help define how AI transforms community building and hiring Your work will impact thousands of founders and candida

Y Combinator is hiring a full-stack product engineer to work at the center of how YC operates — from the application pipeline to events and internal tools. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and operations. You’ll spend most of your time building production software for both internal teams and founders, while also helping design and improve the processes those tools support. At its core, this role is about turning operational complexity into well-designed software. We don’t have traditional PMs or designers. Engineers own the product experience end-to-end — from understanding the problem to designing the UI to shipping the system. The right person is excited to create their own interfaces, workflows, and user experiences, not just implement someone else’s specs. What You’ll Do Product & Engineering (Core) Design, build, and ship full-stack applications powering YC’s admissions pipeline, events platform, and internal tools Develop and extend YC’s events platform (Demo Day, meetups, recruiting events, office hours, investor events), including registration, coordination, and media handling Integrate with external systems (Google Calendar, Slack, email, data pipelines) to coordinate internal teams, external founders and more Build deep AI and search systems (semantic search, embeddings, natural language queries) across large datasets Make pragmatic engineering tradeoffs in a fast-moving environment Process & Automation Build systems that automate YC’s admissions workflow (scheduling, notifications, status tracking, email triage, deadlines) Improve how applications are routed, interviews are coordinated, and information is surfaced to partners Develop internal tools and copilots using LLMs (email classification, workflow automation, natural language interfaces) Eliminate manual work so the team can focus on high-leverage decisions Operations & Decision Support Work directly with partners and ops teams to understand workflows and build better systems Create dashboards and analytics to track pipeline health and operational metrics Contribute to process improvements during admissions cycles Who This Is For This role is ideal if you: Are a strong full-stack, product-minded engineer who enjoys owning products, not just code Love using AI in your work -- your dev stack is fully AI-enabled and you've built AI-enabled products or prototypes Like turning messy, high-stakes workflows into clean, usable systems Want to make product and UX decisions directly, without waiting on PMs or designers Are low-ego and comfortable getting along with everyone in our 100-person company Are comfortable with ambiguity and making tradeoffs Backgrounds That Tend to Succeed Product-minded engineers who’ve built internal tools or workflow systems end-to-end Engineers with experience in building full stack applications or workflow software Former founders or early-stage startup engineers Engineers who have owned both backend systems and frontend/user experience What We’re Looking For Required Experience shipping full-stack web applications Strong system design and independent decision-making Strong product sense and comfort designing user experiences Ability to work directly with non-technical stakeholders Clear communication skills High judgment and integrity Nice to Have Experience with Rails, React, Postgres (or similar) LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent-based systems Workflow automation or integration-heavy systems Founder or early-stage experience We care more about your ability to build and ship complete products than any specific stack. How We Work YC operates with a small, high-trust team. There are no rigid roadmaps or handoffs between product, design, and engineering — engineers are expected to use judgment, talk to users, and build the right thing. You’ll work closely with partners and founders on high-impact problems and be responsible for the full experience, not just the implementation. Details Location: Sa