Y Combinator is building a new generation of products for the AI-native era — and we're hiring product engineers to build them. Some ship in the open to hundreds of thousands of developers (gstack, gbrain — already north of 130,000 GitHub stars between them). Some are proprietary products in their own right (Paxel). All of them start from the same belief: a single builder with the right tooling now ships like a team of twenty, and we intend to build the tools — and the platforms — that prove it.
This is a rare seat. You won't be maintaining someone else's roadmap. You'll be taking new products from zero to one, owning them end-to-end, and putting them in front of real users fast.
Take new products from 0→1 — design, build, and ship full-stack systems and developer tools end-to-end
Build AI-native software: agent orchestration, semantic search, embeddings, knowledge graphs, LLM workflows
Own developer and user experience completely — 30-second installs, time-to-first-value measured in minutes, interfaces people actually want to use
Ship some work in the open and engage a real community; ship other work as commercial product. Pick the right call for each
Use your own fully AI-enabled dev stack and make pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving environment
This role is ideal if you:
Are a strong full-stack, product-minded engineer who owns products, not just code — no PMs, no designers, you make the product and UX calls
Live in an AI-native dev stack and have built AI-enabled products, agents, or prototypes
Care about developer experience and the craft of a tool people love
Like turning hard problems into clean, usable systems and shipping fast
Are low-ego, comfortable with ambiguity, and get along with everyone in our ~100-person company
Former founders and early-stage startup engineers
Prolific open-source contributors or maintainers
Product engineers who've built and shipped complete products end-to-end
Engineers who've owned both backend systems and frontend/user experience
Required - Experience shipping full-stack or systems software end-to-end - Strong system design and independent decision-making - Strong product sense and comfort designing user experiences - Clear communication and the ability to work directly with non-technical stakeholders - High judgment and integrity
Nice to have - LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent-based systems - Open-source maintainership and community engagement - TypeScript, Postgres/pgvector, Rails, React (the stack our current products run on) - Retrieval, search, or knowledge-graph systems
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 on high-impact problems and be responsible for the full experience, not just the implementation.
Compensation: $185K–$485K base + profit-sharing (comparable to startup equity or VC carry)
Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k) + 4% match, parental leave, flexible PTO, and more
Location: San Francisco Bay Area (or willing to relocate)
Work authorization: Y Combinator is willing to sponsor certain employment visas in accordance with company policy.
As a member of the team, you'll get full access to the YC program, just like founders do. You'll learn how YC works, follow hundreds of companies, and meet some of the most successful people in the startup world.
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 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.
Based on 7,515 disclosed Software salaries on RoleSuite, the role pays a median of $155K/year, with most offers between $123K and $196K (10th–90th percentile: $101K–$232K).
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