Infrastructure Software Engineer

Y Combinator is the leading startup accelerator for entrepreneurs. Since 2005, YC has invested in over 4,000 companies, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit, Instacart, DoorDash, and Coinbase. Today, YC has built the most powerful startup community in the world alongside the products and programs to support founders for the life of their company.
Job Description
Y Combinator is seeking an Infrastructure Software Engineer who will help manage and evolve the shared infrastructure that our software runs on. We have a team of approximately 15 Product Engineers who develop YC’s software products. Those products are developed in Ruby on Rails and run in AWS. Our team’s job is to provide a platform so our Product Engineers don’t have to think (as much) about infrastructure.
The ideal candidate will have experience debugging and developing a very broad stack. They’re comfortable talking about HTTP caching, AWS security groups, Rails monkey patching, n+1 queries in Active Record, CSRF protection, and React components.
Enjoy the many perks of working for a successful company – competitive salary and excellent benefits including fully-paid health care benefits and unlimited vacation – while working on a small, fast-moving and high-impact team.
In your first month, you might:
Migrate a Rails application from Capistrano and EC2 to Docker and ECS
Upgrade one of our applications to a newer version of Postgres or Rails
Move more of our AWS infrastructure into Terraform
Simplify our use of Webpack and Javascript for both developer productivity and faster deployments
Create shared infrastructure to help manage email subscriptions and unsubscribes across 5 different product teams
Triage and respond to bug bounty reports
Work with outside security auditors to run a penetration test against our applications
Key Responsibilities:
Provide a stable modern platform for our applications to be deployed to
Keep our applications and data secure
Improve our developer experience and tools so the YC Software Team can ship product updates quickly
Help debug performance issues in our web applications
Ship Ruby on Rails and TypeScript code that is shared among multiple YC applications
Skills:
You know how to develop and debug MVC web applications. We use Ruby on Rails, Postgres, and React, but don’t worry if you haven’t used those specific technologies before
You know how to deploy and run applications with AWS and Docker
You use Terraform to make infrastructure changes
Experience:
You have at least 5 years of experience developing and deploying web applications
You are deeply familiar with the AWS platform specifically ECS, RDS, IAM, and CloudWatch
Location: YC is headquartered in the SF Bay Area with employees working from home or from our offices in San Francisco and Mountain View, CA. Candidates must live in the SF Bay Area or be willing to relocate.
Compensation: $130,000 to $270,000 + bonus (depending on skills and experience).
Benefits: Our full benefits package includes medical, vision, and dental plans, infertility benefit, STD/LTD, life insurance, commuter benefits, flexible spending account, health savings account, 401(k) + 4% matching, generous parental leave, paid holidays and flexible paid time off policy.
Work Authorization: This position does not support work authorization/visa sponsorship.
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 the 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 and can be found here.

Experience
6+ years

Work arrangement
No