Product Engineer, Y Combinator

• 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
• 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
• 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

Desirable

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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