Product Engineer

Y Combinator is hiring a full-stack product engineer to work at the center of how YC operates — from the application pipeline to events and internal tools. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and operations.

You’ll spend most of your time building production software for both internal teams and founders, while also helping design and improve the processes those tools support. At its core, this role is about turning operational complexity into well-designed software.

We don’t have traditional PMs or designers. Engineers own the product experience end-to-end — from understanding the problem to designing the UI to shipping the system. The right person is excited to create their own interfaces, workflows, and user experiences, not just implement someone else’s specs.

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

Who This Is For

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