Founding Engineer at Proliferate | Y Combinator

About Proliferate Proliferate is building the operating system for modern engineering. We are building the company in person in SoMa, San Francisco. We care a lot about intensity, craft, and working with people who want to do the best work of their careers. We work hard, and we also take health seriously: company-expensed Whoop, meaningful health and wellness budget, and top-tier insurance. About the Founder I (Pablo) finished my master's in AI at 19 and joined Onyx (YC W24) as engineer #1, where I spent a year building enterprise AI search before starting Proliferate. You can see what I shipped there here. We’ll be working closely together. About the Role You’d be one of our first engineering hires and build the core product. This is a high-ownership role across product, systems, and user experience. Example work:

Build a new core workflow end to end across agent runtime, product UI, and cloud infrastructure. Design and ship a new interface for human-agent collaboration made possible by a model capability that landed last week. Turn a rough customer pain point into a polished product surface in days. Re-think how engineering teams review, redirect, and trust agent work before merge.

Who We’re Looking For We have an extremely small, flat, talent-dense team. We value urgency, taste, truth-seeking, and people who care deeply about the quality and impact of their work. You might be a great fit if:

You've shipped products from 0 to 1 You want a role that is unusually dense in learning, ownership, and pace You want to work with teammates who have very high standards You care deeply about what you build and who you build it with You want to do your life's work and enable other people to do theirs

Stack TypeScript, React, Next.js, Python, Postgres, Redis, AWS, Rust Comp & Benefits Top-of-market salary plus meaningful equity, full health/dental/vision, all meals covered, equipment budget, and a monthly health and wellness stipend. Interview Process 1. Initial questions (3 minutes) 4 short questions through Work at a Startup. Emphasis on short! Should be around 3 sentences max per answer 2. Phone call with Pablo (15 minutes) A quick call to get to know each other 3.

Technical round (30 minutes) We’ll talk through a technical problem together with a codebase open on your end 4. Work trial (1-3 days, $1-3K) Come to our office by Salesforce Park in SF and we'll try working together. If this isn't possible due to extenuating circumstances, we can make accommodations 5. References + Offer