Product Engineer, Applications Operations

Overview

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Requirements

• 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

Nice to Have

• 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

Qualifications

• 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

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, 401(k) + 4% match
• Parenthood leave
• Flexible PTO

Pay

$250K–$500K base + profit-sharing (comparable to startup equity or VC carry)

Schedule

Full-time