Product Engineer, Post Batch

About the role

Y Combinator is best known for our accelerator batch program, which has helped companies like Airbnb, Stripe and Instacart get started. What is lesser known are the resources that YC provides after the batch -- our YC-only hiring platform (workatastartup.com), regular event planning for alumni founders, and internal software platform for helping founders stay in touch. Our scope keeps increasing, and we’re now looking to bring on a Product Engineer to help us scale our impact even more.

You’ll be working directly with a small software team full of kind people who are eager to help you get up-to-speed. You’ll be relied upon not only to help us tackle our hefty roadmap, but to also explore how YC can leverage its unique structural advantages to help our founders hire great people and build their companies after the batch ends.

In this role, you will:

- Design and build out new features in entirety. Our particular team focuses on helping founders post-batch. This is a range of features/products, with a focus on 1.) workatastartup.com (hiring) and 2.) internal software (helping YC stay in touch with founders and YC alumni).

- Scope and prioritize items on our post-batch roadmap alongside YC partners and others on the YC software team.

- Analyze usage and engagement from both founders, job-seekers and other users to understand what’s working/not working, and make things continuously better.

Who we are

YC is small: the whole company is only 85 people, and our software team makes up 15. We prefer having a small, tight knit crew in which we trust each product engineer to have a ton of autonomy and use their good judgement on what to build — and to build it fast.

Most of our teammates are former founders of founding engineers — we’ve found this tracks to the type of ownership and product-focused approach to our work. You’ll work alongside and learn from a pretty low-ego, impressive crew: the 10th employee at Carta, the 7th engineer at Salesforce, the engineer who built the Facebook Feed, and many former YC founders. (And that’s not even mentioning the Group Partners like Garry and Harj.)

We operate like a startup: our roadmaps evolve very organically, we ship new products and experiment constantly, and we try to be as intellectually honest about what’s working and what’s not working. We look for kind, low-ego collaborative people because we’re all contributing to a monolith codebase — and we and we’re eager to help out wherever we can — to help the founders, our Group Partners, or contribute to new parts of the code that we’ve never touched before.

YC is also knee-deep in applying AI tools and techniques across all of our product surface areas, and investor-focused work is no exception. We’re happy to share more when we chat in person.

What are we looking for

We're looking to work with people who generally impress us. If you've written some impressive software before, whether for yourself or a company, we want to hear about it: what made it technically challenging, why it was hard to get people to use it, and what it took to get it over the finish line.