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Y/n

Software Engineer

San Francisco, CA, US / Remote (DE; GB; US; SE; FR; CH; AT) · Remote

Annual base salary
$120k – $300k USD
Equity
Not disclosed
Commitment
Full Time
Company stage
Not disclosed

Compensation as listed

$120K - $300K  •  0.50% - 2.00%

About Y/n

Y/n is an app where you play a character in your story. Be a boarding school student and get the boys to fall in love with you, or plan a jailbreak with Sherlock Holmes.

Stories are made for you. Your texts change the plot and how characters feel about you, so no two playthroughs are the same (but you can rewind).

There's a Y/n story for every mood: romance, fanfiction, fluff, mystery, and more. Discover 10M+ stories created by the community.

Can't find the one you want? Write and publish your own.

About the role

Hi, my name is Gabriel and I'm the co-founder of Y/n.

Y/n is an app where you play the main character in a story written for you. Be the new kid at a boarding school and get everyone to fall for you, or plan a jailbreak with Sherlock Holmes. Every text you send changes the plot and how characters feel about you, so no two playthroughs are the same.

Our mission at Y/n is to create the most entertaining storyteller in the world, and give it to everyone.

Why you should join us

  • People love Y/n:
  • Users spend on average 3+ hours playing Y/n everyday
  • We are top #10 books apps in the world (reached #4 app in the App Store last month), even though we just launched
  • We raised $14M from top VCs
  • We work on interesting technical problems:
  • We serve ~3T tokens (~300M user messages, growing 40% MoM) per month with a team of 4
  • We manage a LOT of compute!
  • Training an AI to be fun and creative is incredibly interesting
  • The founders + team are fun to work with:
  • My co-founder Eric trained the first-ever image editing AI in the world
  • Before Y/n, I was the founding designer and one of the first employees at Substack, where I learned a lot about product and media
  • Together, we previously co-founded Can of Soup, a hit AI image sharing app, which you can read about in the New York Times

Some examples of what you would do

You'd be one of our first engineers, with real ownership across the product and the infrastructure. In practice that could mean:

  • Building our personalized recommendation system infrastructure
  • Building features in our mobile and web application

The role will adapt and grow as we do, so don’t worry if you haven’t worked on recommender systems or ML yet!

What we’re looking for

  • You’ve built actual infrastructure (not just pushed to Vercel)
  • You’ve worked at a startup or built meaningful side projects
  • Optional: you’re into fandom, reading, games, or fanfiction!
  • You're willing to relocate to San Francisco. If you do not have US work authorization, we can help with that

Technology

Our mission to solve one of the hardest challenges in computing: to train an AI to write the most creative stories in the world. It brings its own fun sub-challenges: we run our own datacenter, collect data in-house, and serve trillions of inference tokens each month.

Interview Process

  1. Send us your Github
  2. 30 min interview with Gabriel (CEO)
  3. Technical with Eric (CTO)
  4. Possible take-home or work trial
  5. Offer

Source: Y Combinator. Confirm availability with the employer.

Apply through the original posting.

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