I currently run YC’s infrastructure and I need some help! Over the last 7 years I’ve been at YC, our software team has grown considerably both in engineers and in products. We need to invest more in our infrastructure so we can keep shipping our products quickly.
The main thing you’ll need in this job is curiosity; I work at every layer of a very large stack. One day you might dig into AWS apis, another it’s a 3rd party Ruby gem or our git history. Or maybe you get paged that all the SSDs for Hacker News (primary and standby!) died on the same day :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32028511.
The first few months will be heavier on infrastructure work but in the future the job will hopefully be equal parts developer experience, infrastructure work, and product engineering that impacts all of our products (think SSO, sending email, security, etc).
The main products we support are all Ruby on Rails apps running in AWS (mostly in ECS); ideally you’ve already worked on apps like that. You have at least 5 years of experience. Part of that was shipping code to customers but you’ve also got cloud experience (we try to mostly use Terraform). You’re probably the person people turn to when there’s a fire to put out.
YC has excellent compensation and benefits (see more in the formal job description: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/y-combinator/jobs/0Ewh...). The team and the work life balance are great. About half of us are former founders and many of us are parents. And if you’re curious about startups (and possibly starting one someday), this job gives you amazing access to interact with YC’s programs, partners, and founders.
If you’re interested, I’d love to chat! I’m mark@ycombinator.com.