Y Combinator has a small ~12 person team that makes the software that runs YC. Hardly any investors write software, but YC was started by programmers so it's natural for us to solve our problems that way. We believe our software is a key competitive advantage and we are investing aggressively in new software products.

As a member of the software team, you'll get full access to the YC program, just like founders do. You'll learn the ins and outs of how YC works, and you'll get to follow and learn from hundreds of companies. You'll meet some of the most successful people in the startup world and get exposed to the best startup ideas. And of course, if you ever want to start your own company, you’ll learn a lot about that from working at YC.

Y Combinator is run by a small team that is committed to helping founders build their startup and make it take off like the next Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit or Doordash (all companies that previously went through YC). 

While YC is primarily known for it’s batch program for founders, what’s lesser known is that we have our own small-but-mighty software team. We build tools to help run YC, as well as to help our founders have an unfair advantage — through our unparalleled founder network, expert advice from YC General Partners, exclusive funding opportunities, and much more.

Working at YC is a unique place to operating like a startup — talking to customers and shipping code rapidly — and also be surrounded and learning at the frontier of the new startup world.

About the role

While the software team itself is very small (~15 people), the impact of our software for our founders and for YC itself is quite massive. Some examples of the software you’d get to work on:

• YC’s application software. Every batch, we review over 20K applicants, manage interviews with thousands of founders, and select just over 100 companies — all within 3 weeks. To accomplish this feat, we write serious power tools to help partners like Garry and Harj manage the process and make decisions, and we’re constantly working to make the software better.
• Founder fundraising software. We’ve built the most critical tools for founders to raise a successful seed round: a leads pipeline from Demo Day, legal tools to execute YC safes, and an all-in-one CRM to manage investor relations. Founders regularly tell us that this is the best part of YC.
• Investment software. YC manages over $6B in our fund, and we write software to help us manage it end-to-end: how to invest it, know where it’s allocated, and even use AI to keep our records up-to-date with what founders need from us.
• Hiring platform. We’ve built a job marketplace with over 2M job seekers for founders to engage, as well a full suite of messaging and AI-assisted recruiting tools to help founders find great people and hire faster.

And despite all of this, we still feel like we’re just getting started. We have a lot of great ideas on every front to improve how YC operates and to bring tremendous value to our startups, and many of them are 🤫.

About the team

As a company, we largely abide by the same principles we teach our startups - so if you've read Paul Graham's essays or watched our videos on YouTube, you can already predict what it would be like to work here.  

Many of our software teammates have worked at or started startups themselves, while also having experience from bigger companies like Meta and Google. This tends to be a good balance to know how to ship quickly, but also make strong product and technical decisions that don’t leave us with dead ends. True to YC advice, our product engineers talk to our customers regularly and ship fast. We also define our own roadmap and often design our own products when needed. 

Our stack is pretty straightforward (Rails, React, Postgres), and the last three engineers have learned it on the job. That said, we’ve found that enjoying front-end software development is key to being successful here, so it’s almost a requirement for the role. Our needs as an organization require a large degree of flexibility, and people change teams quite often. 

More and more, our founders are introducing AI in all they do — how they code, how their product works, and how they streamline their own operations. At YC, we’re similarly pushing the boundaries of how AI can improve our software and help our companies. We’re excited to share more in person — so please take a moment to apply. ;-)

Lastly: If you’re interested in starting your own startup one day: eight former engineers on our team have gone on to start YC-funded startups.  If you want to start your own startup someday but aren’t ready to do it now, working at YC could be an excellent way to get there, provided you’re willing to be here for at least 2-3 years.

Location: YC is headquartered in San Francisco and we’re looking for people who either live in the SF Bay Area or are willing to relocate. We are mostly in-office because we like being in-person and hanging out; we have reasonable flexibility with WFH on a case-by-case basis.

Compensation: $185K to $300K base salary, depending on experience. We also offer carry in the YC fund, which offers potential upside in the YC investment fund. (It would be the investment equivalent of upside at a startup.)

Benefits: Our full benefits package includes medical, vision, and dental plans, infertility benefit, STD/LTD, life insurance, commuter benefits, flexible spending account, health savings account, 401(k) + 4% matching, generous parental leave, paid holidays and flexible paid time off policy.

Work Authorization: This position supports people who are already authorized to work in the United States (U.S. citizens and existing applicable visas), H1B transfers, and TN visa sponsorship (typically for Canada and Mexico).

Y Combinator considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law including San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance. Y Combinator is committed to protecting the privacy of the personal information of job applicants and complying with the California Consumer Privacy Act.

The YC internal software is mostly written in Ruby on Rails and React. It runs on AWS and PostgreSQL. Previous experience developing web apps will be helpful, but we don't care if you've used React or Rails specifically.

Note: Hacker News is written in Lisp, but Hacker News is run by a separate team.