Product Engineer, Applications Operations

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