Product Engineer, Applications Operations

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

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: San Francisco Bay Area (or willing to relocate)
• Compensation: $250K-$500K base + profit-sharing (comparable to startup equity or VC carry)
• Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k) + 4% match, parental leave, flexible PTO, and more

Work Authorization

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

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