“YC startup” sounds like one employer with one front door. It is really several thousand small companies that share an investor, a few job pages and a habit of hiring through the founders. That changes the strategy. You are not trying to get past one recruiting team; you are trying to be in front of the right twenty founders at the moment each of them decides to hire.
Y Combinator gives you more public information to do that with than almost any other investor. Every funded company has a page naming its founders, batch and team size, and every listing on YC’s own job pages states pay, equity, experience and visa terms. The work is reading that information well and then choosing the route: a profile founders can find, an application to a posted role, or a direct note to the founder.
How often does YC fund new startups you could join?
Four times a year. Y Combinator now runs a winter, spring, summer and fall batch, investing $500k in each company, and every batch ends with a Demo Day for investors and press.
For a job seeker, that rhythm is the useful part. Every few months a new group of companies has fresh money, a product that just launched and, often, a founder who has never hired before. YC’s directory page listed Fall 2026 as the current batch when we checked on 15 October, and the Hacker News jobs page was inviting founders to apply for Winter 2027 “till November 2.”
You will see batches written as short codes on every listing: W25, S23, F24 and P26 all appeared on YC’s job pages on 15 October. Newer codes usually mean smaller teams, but check the team size on the company page rather than guessing from the batch.
Where do YC startups post their jobs?
In three YC-run places, plus each company’s own careers page. Use all of them, because no single one has every role.
Work at a Startup: one application that YC founders can browse
YC Work at a Startup is YC’s own job site, and it works differently from a board. Its FAQ answers “What job am I actually applying for?” with: “You don’t need to apply for a specific job or company. When you fill out an application, we make it available to startups that Y Combinator has funded. If a company is interested in your application, they’ll contact you.”
YC’s jobs page sums up the trade: “Apply to thousands of startup jobs with a single profile,” and “Let YC founders contact you or browse companies privately.” The FAQ says the companies hire “for all roles, including engineering, design, product, recruiting and operations,” so this is not only for engineers.
It has a gap you should know about. Asked whether every YC company uses it, the FAQ says: “Most do but not all. If you want to reach a YC company that’s not in our directory yet, you should apply directly on their own website.”
ycombinator.com/jobs and the Jobs tab on each company page
YC’s public job pages group listings by role and location, with remote pages for each role. Every company in the YC Startup Directory, which YC describes as “A list of companies YC has funded”, has a page with its batch, team size, status and the names of its founders, plus a Jobs tab. That page is the fastest way to answer the two questions that decide your approach: how big is the team, and who runs it?
The Hacker News jobs page, where only YC companies post
The jobs tab on Hacker News states its scope in one line: “These are jobs at YC startups.” Harj Taggar, then running Triplebyte and formerly a YC partner, noted in a 2018 post on YC’s blog that “Hacker News job postings themselves are only available to YC companies”. On 15 October 2026 the page carried posts such as “Bild AI (YC W25) Is Hiring a Founding Product Engineer” and “Truemetrics (YC S23) Is Hiring a GTM Founder’s Associate”. Posts there are often written by founders, in their own voice, which tells you who to write to.
How do you read a YC job listing before you apply?
Read the header lines before the description. YC listings put pay, equity, experience and visa terms in fixed fields, and those fields rule you in or out faster than anything else on the page.
Here are two real listings, checked on 15 October 2026, with what each field tells you.
| Field | Bild AI, Founding Product Engineer | truemetrics, GTM Founder’s Associate | What to take from it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Batch and team size | W25, team of 9 | S23, team of 5 | Under about 20 people, a founder probably reads applications |
| Pay and equity | $120K to $180K, 0.10% to 0.40% | €50K to €60K, 0.10% to 0.50% | Both are published, so you can decide before you write |
| Location | San Francisco, in office | Berlin | YC companies are not all in the US |
| Experience | “Any (new grads ok)” | “1+ years” | The bar is often lower than the title suggests |
| Visa | “US citizen/visa only” | “US citizenship/visa not required” | The line that decides it for most applicants outside the US |
| What to send | “Why we’re a fit”, and “Please keep it short” | Apply through the YC page | Some founders tell you exactly what the first message should contain |
| Process | Intro, two technical hours, then a “3-5 day paid work trial” | Work directly with “the two founders” | Expect to show work, not only talk about it |
The visa line deserves a count of its own. On 15 October, YC’s remote software engineer page carried 29 listings. Of those, 23 said “US citizen/visa only”, 3 said “Will sponsor” and 3 said “US citizenship/visa not required”. Five said “Any (new grads ok)” for experience. Most remote roles were scoped to a country, usually “Remote (US)”, with a few naming Canada, India, Singapore or Ireland; only 2 of the 29 said plain “Remote”, so “remote” on a YC listing rarely means anywhere in the world.
What do YC founders look for in their first hires?
Evidence that you will ship without supervision and stay useful when the plan changes. The clearest statements of this come from the listings themselves, written by the founders who will read your note.
Bild AI’s listing, under “We want”, asks for “Growth mindset, slope > y-intercept” and says “Don’t mind schlep. We are regularly knee-deep in schlep”. Its bonus points go to people who “Have built something people used/paid for”. The truemetrics listing warns: “If you want structure, rigid processes, and a slow corporate environment, this is not the place for you.” Neither asks for a famous employer.
YC’s own writing points the same way. Sam Altman’s Startup Playbook, written to distil YC’s advice to founders, tells them: “For people you don’t already know, try to work on a project together before they join full-time.” That is why paid work trials, take-home builds and “show me something you made” requests are common at YC companies. It also says “Do not hire chronically negative people”, because “the rest of the world will be predicting your demise every day”. A note that criticises the product without offering anything reads badly to a founder who has heard that all week.
And the founders hire through people they already trust before anyone else. In Harj Taggar’s guide, the advice to a founder making a first engineering hire is: “For your first three engineering hires I’d recommend focusing exclusively on personal network hiring.” You cannot join a founder’s network overnight, but a specific note about their product, followed by work they can look at, is the closest thing to it.
Should you email a YC founder directly?
Yes, when the company is small and the founder is still the one hiring. A YC company page gives you the founders’ names and the team size, and a recent launch or Demo Day gives you a reason to write now.
The signs that a note will land:
- The team is under about 20. Bild AI had 9 people and truemetrics 5. At that size, a founder’s inbox is the hiring pipeline.
- The role isn’t posted yet, or the company isn’t on Work at a Startup. YC’s own FAQ sends you to the company’s website in that case; a short note to the founder is the faster version of the same advice.
- You have something specific to say. One detail about their product, plus one thing you shipped that answers it. Generic praise for “what you’re building” gets skipped.
When it doesn’t: at a YC company of several hundred people with a recruiting team, your note gets forwarded into the same queue as an application. Apply there and save the founder notes for small teams.
A note to a recent-batch founder can be this short. The company and names here are made up, modelled on the kind of listing in the table above:
Subject: Your estimating screen, from a full-stack engineer
Hi Priya, I read your listing and your post on the Hacker News jobs page. I have spent two years building React and Python tools for field teams who still work from paper, most recently a quoting screen that cut a contractor’s estimate time from a day to an hour. Your listing asks for someone who will watch customers use the product each week; I’d like that. Could I send you a two-minute video of that quoting screen?
Sam
The specifics come from the listing (React, Python, weekly customer contact), the result is the sender’s own, and the ask is small. The cold email guide for startup founders has more templates and the follow-up, and finding a startup founder’s email covers the address.
Where Backdoor fits in a YC-focused search
The hard part of the founder route is not writing one note. It is noticing, every week, which YC companies just launched, raised or started hiring, finding each founder’s address, and keeping up the follow-ups. Backdoor is built for that loop.
YC is the first source on the list it reads each morning, alongside Product Hunt launches, funding news and careers pages, and it keeps the companies that just raised, launched or started hiring. For each one that fits you, it locates the founder’s email address and prepares a message on why you match that team, and nothing is sent until you approve the draft. Approved notes go out from your own Gmail, and up to three follow-ups stay in that same thread until the founder answers.
Its FAQ describes its users as people “aiming for a pre-seed to Series C startup”, and it is not limited to YC: the same morning search picks up startups backed by other investors, anywhere. Finding startups, research on your background and resume help are free; sending the outreach is the paid part. It also gives away a free Google Sheet of YC startups with open roles, which it says it checked on 7 October 2026, with a founder and a public contact email on each row.
What it won’t do: submit your Work at a Startup profile or apply to posted YC roles for you. Keep doing those yourself.
Which route suits you: profile, application or founder note?
Most people should run all three, but the weight depends on your situation.
- You need visa sponsorship in the US. Lean on the application route and filter for “Will sponsor” first; only 3 of 29 remote listings said it on 15 October. Founder notes still help at small companies that sponsor.
- You are outside the US and want to stay there. Search YC’s pages for your country and for remote scopes such as “Remote (IN)”, and look at YC companies based where you live, like truemetrics in Berlin. Remote startup job sites covers the other boards.
- You are a new graduate. Filter for “Any (new grads ok)”, then make the work do the talking: a project close to what the company builds, linked in the first line.
- You want startups beyond YC too. Wellfound covers startups from many investors, and finding startups before they post roles shows how to read funding and launch news across all of them.
A backend engineer in Toronto targeting the newest YC batches
Day 1. Fills in one Work at a Startup application and leaves it open to founders. Bookmarks YC’s remote backend page and the Hacker News jobs page.
Day 2. Opens the 15 most recent listings and drops every one marked “US citizen/visa only” unless it also mentions Canada. Six remain.
Day 3. Opens each company page. Keeps the four with teams under 20, notes the founders’ names, batch and the one thing each company shipped most recently.
Days 4 and 5. Applies to the two posted roles that fit, then writes four founder notes: one detail about the product, one shipped result (a queue that cut job retries by half), one small ask.
Day 9. Sends a short follow-up in the same thread to the founders who haven’t answered, adding a link to a small fix for an issue in one company’s public repo.
Day 14. Counts replies by route. Two founder replies, one application reply, nothing from the profile yet. Next fortnight shifts toward notes.
The numbers are illustrative. Keep the shape: filter on the visa line first, read team size second, and give every note one specific detail.
Your first YC week: profile, filters, five founders
- Monday: fill in one Work at a Startup application and let founders contact you.
- Tuesday: on ycombinator.com/jobs, open your role’s page and its remote page. Note the visa and experience line on every listing before reading the rest.
- Wednesday: for each listing that passes, open the company page and record batch, team size and founders.
- Thursday: apply to the posted roles that fit, and check the Hacker News jobs page for posts written by founders.
- Friday: write to five founders at the smallest companies on your list, each note built on one detail from their listing or launch, and put a follow-up date for each in your calendar.
How we chose
We compare tools on what their own public pages say, checked on the dates shown, and label every claim. How we compare tools.
FAQ
How to get a job at a yc startup
Use three routes at once. Fill in one application on Work at a Startup, which YC makes available to the startups it has funded; apply to specific listings on ycombinator.com/jobs or a company's own careers page; and write a short note to founders at small, recent-batch companies whose work you can speak to. Read each listing's visa and experience lines first, because they rule many people in or out before anyone reads a resume.
How to work at a yc startup
Treat it as a search across a few thousand small companies rather than one employer. Work at a Startup lets YC founders find and contact you, the Hacker News jobs page carries posts from YC companies only, and each company page on ycombinator.com names its founders, batch and team size. The smaller and newer the company, the more likely a founder reads your note personally.
Can i get a job at a y combinator startup if i'm not in the us and have no visa
Yes, but filter hard. On 15 October 2026, YC's remote software engineer page showed 29 listings: 23 said "US citizen/visa only", 3 said "Will sponsor" and 3 said "US citizenship/visa not required", and some remote roles were scoped to India. Look for that visa line, for remote scopes outside the US, and for YC companies based in your own country, such as truemetrics in Berlin.
Sources checked
Show 12 sources
- What Happens at YC | Y Combinator, checked
- The YC Startup Directory | Y Combinator, checked
- FAQ | Y Combinator's Work at a Startup, checked
- Find the best startup jobs and remote jobs curated by Y Combinator. | Y Combinator, checked
- Remote Software Engineer jobs at Y Combinator startups | Y Combinator, checked
- Founding Product Engineer at Bild AI | Y Combinator, checked
- GTM Founder's Associate at truemetrics | Y Combinator, checked
- jobs | Hacker News, checked
- How to Hire Your First Engineer (Harj Taggar, Y Combinator, 21 August 2018), checked
- Startup Playbook, by Sam Altman, checked
- AI job agent that emails startup founders for you (backdoorai.app), checked
- 200 YC Startups Hiring (Free List), backdoorai.app, checked