Product Engineer, Work at a Startup

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

For this particular role, we’re looking for an engineer excited to help grow YC’s hiring platform, workatastartup.com. Hiring early talent is one of the most challenging things as a startup, and YC has helped over 1600 people get jobs through our platform. (Even Doordash, Coinbase, and Instacart have hired people on our platform – so it works at scale!) We’re excited to invest more time and effort into making it the best place to find a job at a great startup.

Examples of projects we’ve worked on:

• Inbox and messaging. We focus on making hiring/getting a job more conversational and informal, and put you directly in contact with founders, not just recruiters. 

• Enterprise sourcing & ATS tools. Our founders use our tools to find hidden gems among a sea of 1M great candidates – to find the right fit to build their startup.

• Job candidate profiles. Finding the best ways to let candidates show what they’re great at, through their experience, GitHub profile, or other places they can shine. 

• Growth. Our integrations with ycombinator.com, LinkedIn, and ATS systems have grown our presence and top of funnel for founders to find the best technical talent. 

We feel like we’re just getting started and have a lot of great ideas to help scale hiring at startups with our small, focused team of three.

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: $180,000 to $270,000 base (depending on skills and experience) plus bonus. 

Benefits: YC has a profit-sharing program, which is comparable to equity in an early-stage startup or carry in a VC fund.

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: This position does not support work authorization/visa sponsorship. 

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.