Product Engineer, New Products

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 eng