Investment Associate & Product Engineer

Y Combinator is looking for a full-stack product engineer who also wants to apply their skills to investing, diligence, and founder support. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and investing. You will spend much of your time writing production code — building internal and founder-facing tools — while also contributing directly to company evaluation and investment decisions.

This is not two jobs stitched together. The core of the role is turning judgment into software: using code to improve how YC evaluates companies, supports founders, and scales its impact after the batch.

What you'll do:

- Product & Engineering (core responsibility)

- Design, build, and ship full-stack web applications for partners, founders, and investors

- Own features end-to-end: scoping, design, implementation, and iteration

- Work across frontend, backend, and data layers to improve YC's post-batch and internal platforms (e.g., founder tools, analytics, workflow systems)

- Make pragmatic engineering tradeoffs in a fast-moving, high-ownership environment

- Investing & Analysis

- Evaluate post-batch and growth-stage companies by analyzing business models, markets, teams, and operating metrics

- Contribute to diligence efforts, including reviewing decks and data rooms, benchmarking KPIs, and conducting market or customer research

- Build and maintain analytical tools, dashboards, or workflows that support investment decisions

- Write clear, structured memos and analyses for partners and our Investment Committee

This role is ideal for someone who:

- Is a strong full-stack engineer and enjoys owning production software

- Likes talking to users and senior stakeholders to decide what to build

- Is curious about investing and wants hands-on exposure

- Prefers ownership and impact over narrowly scoped tickets

- Is energized by ambiguity and comfortable making tradeoffs

- Can translate ambiguous ...