Product Engineer ($250K-$500K) at Y Combinator

Job Title: Product Engineer, Applications Operations Salary: $250K–$500K Company Description: Y Combinator - The world's most influential startup accelerator Job Description: You will build the operational backbone of YC, developing full-stack systems for the admissions pipeline, Demo Day, and internal tools. As an AI-native engineer, you'll own the entire product lifecycle—from UI design to backend architecture—without PMs or designers, turning high-stakes operational complexity into elegant, automated software that supports thousands of founders. Location: San Francisco, USA Why this role is remarkable: You have total product ownership, acting as your own PM and designer to ship features that directly impact how the world's top startups are selected and supported. Join an elite 18-person engineering team at the heart of an ecosystem that has launched over 5,000 companies valued at more than $600 billion. The compensation structure is unique, offering a high base salary plus profit-sharing designed to be comparable to startup equity or venture capital carry. What you will do: Design and ship full-stack applications for the YC admissions pipeline, including semantic search, LLM-driven email classification, and automated interview scheduling. Build and scale the digital infrastructure for major events like Demo Day, handling registration, investor coordination, and complex media workflows. Partner directly with YC partners to identify manual bottlenecks and develop custom internal tools that automate decision-making processes. The ideal candidate: A product-minded full-stack engineer with a proven track record of shipping complete web applications and owning the end-to-end user experience. Highly proficient with AI-enabled development (e.g., Cursor, Copilot) and experienced in integrating LLMs or vector databases into production environments. A low-ego builder who thrives in ambiguity, potentially a former founder or early-stage engineer, comfortable working in a high-trust, fast-moving environment. #J-18808-Ljbffr Jack & Jill/External ATS