Product Engineer, New Products

Y Combinator; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 185,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical

Dental

Vision

401(k) + 4% match

Parental leave

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Y Combinator is seeking product engineers to build AI-native tools and end-to-end products, taking new ideas from zero to one and delivering them to real users quickly.

You will own the full stack, from design to deployment, focusing on developer experience, rapid iteration, and pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving environment in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping full-stack or systems software end-to-end
• Strong system design and independent decision-making
• Strong product sense and comfort designing user experiences
• Clear communication with non-technical stakeholders
• Ability to work without a formal PM/UX handoff

Responsibilities

• Take new products from 0→1 — design, build, and ship full-stack systems and developer tools end-to-end
• Build AI-native software: agent orchestration, semantic search, embeddings, knowledge graphs, LLM workflows
• Own developer and user experience completely — 30-second installs, time-to-first-value in minutes
• Ship some work in the open and engage a real community; ship other work as commercial product
• Use an AI-enabled dev stack and make pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving environment

Skills

Full-stack engineer

Product mindset

Independent decision-making

System design

User experience

Clear communication

Ambiguity tolerance

Tools

TypeScript

Postgres/pgvector

Rails

React

Knowledge graphs

Retrieval systems

Job description

About the role

Y Combinator is building a new generation of products for the AI-native era — and we're hiring product engineers to build them. Some ship in the open to hundreds of thousands of developers (gstack, gbrain — already north of 130,000 GitHub stars between them). Some are proprietary products in their own right (Paxel). All of them start from the same belief: a single builder with the right tooling now ships like a team of twenty, and we intend to build the tools — and the platforms — that prove it.

This is a rare seat. You won't be maintaining someone else's roadmap. You'll be taking new products from zero to one, owning them end-to-end, and putting them in front of real users fast.

What you'll do

• Take new products from 0→1 — design, build, and ship full-stack systems and developer tools end-to-end




• Build AI-native software: agent orchestration, semantic search, embeddings, knowledge graphs, LLM workflows




• Own developer and user experience completely — 30-second installs, time-to-first-value measured in minutes, interfaces people actually want to use




• Ship some work in the open and engage a real community; ship other work as commercial product. Pick the right call for each




• Use your own fully AI-enabled dev stack and make pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving environment

Who this is for

This role is ideal if you:

• Are a strong full-stack, product-minded engineer who owns products, not just code — no PMs, no designers, you make the product and UX calls




• Live in an AI-native dev stack and have built AI-enabled products, agents, or prototypes




• Care about developer experience and the craft of a tool people love




• Like turning hard problems into clean, usable systems and shipping fast




• Are low-ego, comfortable with ambiguity, and get along with everyone in our ~100-person company

Backgrounds that tend to succeed

• Former founders and early-stage startup engineers




• Prolific open-source contributors or maintainers




• Product engineers who've built and shipped complete products end-to-end




• Engineers who've owned both backend systems and frontend/user experience

What we’re looking for

Required - Experience shipping full-stack or systems software end-to-end - Strong system design and independent decision-making - Strong product sense and comfort designing user experiences - Clear communication and the ability to work directly with non-technical stakeholders - High judgment and integrity

Nice to have - LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent-based systems - Open-source maintainership and community engagement - TypeScript, Postgres/pgvector, Rails, React (the stack our current products run on) - Retrieval, search, or knowledge-graph systems

We care more about your ability to build and ship complete products than any specific stack.

How we work

YC operates with a small, high-trust team. There are no rigid roadmaps or handoffs between product, design, and engineering — engineers are expected to use judgment, talk to users, and build the right thing. You'll work on high-impact problems and be responsible for the full experience, not just the implementation.

Details

• Compensation: $185K–$485K base + profit-sharing (comparable to startup equity or VC carry)




• Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k) + 4% match, parental leave, flexible PTO, and more




• Location: San Francisco Bay Area (or willing to relocate)




• Work authorization: Y Combinator is willing to sponsor certain employment visas in accordance with company policy.

As a member of the team, you'll get full access to the YC program, just like founders do. You'll learn how YC works, follow hundreds of companies, and meet some of the most successful people in the startup world.

Legal note: 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 personal information of job applicants and complying with the California Consumer Privacy Act. The privacy policy of Ashby, Inc., the hiring platform used by Y Combinator, governs the collection of such data.