Product Engineer, Applications Operations

What You’ll Do

• 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

Who This Is For

• 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