Product Engineer, Applications Operations

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.