Interviewing for a software role at YC

Thank you for taking the time to learn more about YC’s interview process.

Here at YF, we’re looking for product engineers who enjoy talking to customers, iterating & shipping quickly, and exhibit a strong sense of ownership and autonomy. Our small teams of engineers largely define and drive their own roadmap, and use their product sense to define and ship an MVP. (Much like how we tell our founders to build their own startups.)

Our interview process is designed to find these kinds of engineers. Moreover, we try to ask questions that are relevant to the types of products we build -- mostly full stack work, with a bit of database, analysis and customer interaction. In most cases, the interview process we have is language agnostic, as we offer the opportunity to learn our stack.

Below is what to expect in our interview process.

Phone Screen

This stage is a more informal call to get to know more about the role, and for you to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for you. We are looking for people with a strong interest in startups and motivation to help them; this is usually exhibited by past experience working at or starting one yourself.

Additionally, we’re a small software team largely not likely to scale. This means limited opportunities to “grow” compared to larger organizations, and fewer opportunities to manage. In this chat, you’re welcome to ask lots of questions about whether working at YC makes sense for you.

Lastly, the conversation will cover some light technical discussion about your past projects. Mostly, we want to know that you can code and ship fairly involved systems, and speak to them with clarity on the details. This tends to be a good indication that an engineer had strong ownership and showed autonomy in making product or technical decisions.

Technical Screen

Our initial screen is intended as a first pass to assess basic programming skills.

String manipulation. (Tommy or Cat) This exercise involves some string manipulation and comparison. You'll be given a text file to read in, the signature of a function, and example input/outputs.

You'll be using your own computer, and using whatever language/environment you are most comfortable with. You’re also free to google for syntax. We believe this helps developers feel more comfortable during the process, and avoids any learning curve or limitations of 3rd party platforms (Coderpen, etc.).

Interview Process

The interview process is a deeper dive into technical abilities, product thinking and overall fit. For the “fit” portion, we are again looking for ownership and autonomy, but we also dig deeper into communication. This is evaluated throughout the process -- in how you communicate your approach, solutions and overall thinking.

Each interview is 1 hour long, with 45 minutes allocated for the technical portion, and 15 minutes for Q&A. In general, it helps to have read a bit about YC, PG’s essays on startups and have tried the products we build. (Though that might not be possible in all circumstances.) The process is the same for most of our technical roles, and gives you the opportunity to ask questions throughout.

Each interview in more detail:

Debugging / API design. (Mark or Coco) Working with existing code is required for most engineers, so we’ve built an interview to test for it. You’ll be given code to debug and fix, and communicate your process of doing so. Please let us know your programming language of choice beforehand. If the debugging problem has issues (getting it to run on your local), we have a backup API design question. Whiteboard (Casey) Similar to the technical screen, we will ask one or more short language-agnostic coding questions, and you are welcome to use whatever development environment you prefer. We are interested in hearing how you approach the problem; seeing how you write, test, and debug the solution; and then discussing the tradeoffs of your solution, and how they turned out. System design. (Matt or Katherine) We’re looking for familiarity with building systems, and in particular ones that are based on relational databases. It’s something like "how would you build Reddit", walking through objects and relationships, and going into more complexity as needed. We also talk through users and metrics a bit too. Team fit. (Jared). Jared is a partner at YC and runs the software team. This portion is more behavioral and will cover your past experiences, interest in startups and how you operate in smaller teams. (No coding is involved at this step.) Product thinking (Jared). This is a discussion about how you would build a feature (typically one we've already had to build) and your decision making. You’ll be mostly drawing a UI (not coding) so be prepared to have a drawing tool handy. (Google has this basic free drawing tool that works fine, or use your own tool). We try to schedule two portions of the interview at a time. After the first two interviews, we sometimes short-circuit the process with a “no-hire”. (On rare occasions, we short-circuit the process for a “hire” as well.) We have found that going through the entire process gives us enough to make a go/no-go decision. We offer feedback to candidates who request it, and relate the feedback to the skills, qualification and interview process above.

Lastly, all candidates end up talking to two more people after the technical rounds: our HR team (to talk about compensation expectations, benefits and other general YC matters) and YC’s President Geoff Ralston, who makes sure to meet every prospective employee of YC.

Timing

The typical interview process takes a month from start to finish. This tends to be mostly based on our eng team’s availability. That said, we have moved more quickly and look to accommodate candidates who might have a short timeline or competing offers. The more information you can share about your situation and where you are in the process, the more we can either attempt to expedite/match, or save you time if we cannot.