Careers

Early roles at fast-growing AI startups.

I recruit for a small set of YC-backed AI startups in San Francisco. Company names stay private until there's mutual interest. Apply once with a short video and your résumé. I review every application myself and send it to every hiring manager whose role fits your skills. When one wants to meet you, I'll tell you who the company is and make the intro.

7 open roles SF + some remote (US) YC-backed AI startups One application for every role

Open roles

One video. Every role that fits.

Every role is full-time, comes with equity, and is at a YC-backed AI startup. Tap one for the full description. You only apply once.

Full-time · San Francisco or remote (US)

Founding Account Executive

Own the full sales cycle for a fast-growing ads business: find advertisers, run the first call, and close their first campaign.

B2B salesFull-cycleAdvertisingDeveloper tools
$160K–$200K OTEView role

Full-time · San Francisco or remote (US)

Founding SDR

Fill the pipeline: build prospect lists, run outbound across email, phone and LinkedIn, and get advertisers to a first campaign.

OutboundProspectingCold callingAdvertising
$100K–$120K OTEView role

Full-time · San Francisco or remote

Founding Advertiser Success Manager

Get new advertisers live, keep every account moving, and grow repeat spend, working directly with the founders.

Customer successAccount managementAd operations
$75K–$100KView role

Full-time · San Francisco

Founding Growth Marketer

Own paid acquisition across Meta, Google, Reddit, YouTube and X, plus the creative testing and funnel experiments behind it.

Paid acquisitionCreative testingFunnel optimization
$100K–$150KView role

Full-time · San Francisco, in person

Special Projects Operator

Recruit and run a network of domain experts, and build the tools that automate it. Half project manager, half builder.

OperationsRecruitingAutomationNew grads welcome
$125K–$400KView role

Full-time · San Francisco, in person

Research Engineer

Build the systems that generate RL environments for leading AI labs, from agentic QA to petabyte-scale data pipelines.

TypeScriptPostgresDistributed systemsRL
$125K–$400KView role

Full-time · San Francisco, in person

Offensive Security RL Researcher

Lead cybersecurity evals and environments for frontier AI labs. A security researcher first, who can also ship production code.

PentestingBug bountyAI securityPython
$200K–$500KView role
All roles

Full-time · San Francisco or remote (US)

Founding Account Executive

B2B salesFull-cycleAdvertisingDeveloper tools

About the company

A YC-backed AI developer product used by hundreds of thousands of developers every month and growing double digits week over week. It's funded by advertising and already brings in millions in ad revenue. The team is small and includes several former YC founders, so every hire is a founding hire.

The role

Own the full sales cycle for the ads business: find the right advertisers, make the first call, and close their first campaign. You'll be one of the first people on the revenue team, so you'll help decide how the company sells.

What you'll do

  • Pick the advertiser segments worth chasing, starting with developer tools and software companies, and build targeted prospect lists.
  • Run steady outbound through cold email, calls and follow-ups, and test messages, offers and channels to learn what converts.
  • Jump on qualified inbound leads fast: run discovery calls and demos, and help advertisers set campaign goals and starting budgets.

What they're looking for

  • You've prospected and closed B2B deals yourself and can point to the revenue you brought in.
  • You're comfortable on the phone, write sharp outreach, and follow up without being reminded.
  • You can build a pipeline and your own habits with no sales team around you.
  • You're interested in AI and developer products.

Bonus

  • You've sold advertising, sponsorships or developer tools.

What success looks like

  • New paying advertisers, collected revenue, a healthy pipeline, and a repeatable process that turns outreach into live campaigns.
All roles

Full-time · San Francisco or remote (US)

Founding SDR

OutboundProspectingCold callingAdvertising

About the company

A YC-backed AI developer product used by hundreds of thousands of developers every month and growing double digits week over week. It's funded by advertising and already brings in millions in ad revenue. The team is small and includes several former YC founders, so every hire is a founding hire.

The role

Be the engine at the top of the ads funnel. You'll find advertisers who should be spending with the company, start the conversation, and get them to a first campaign, working directly with the founders.

What you'll do

  • Build targeted prospect lists, starting with developer tools, software and other products developers use.
  • Run outbound every day across cold email, calls and LinkedIn, and test messages, offers and channels to see what converts.
  • Respond quickly to qualified inbound leads, run discovery calls and demos, and help advertisers set goals and a first budget.

What they're looking for

  • You've prospected and closed B2B business yourself and have specific revenue numbers to show for it.
  • You make calls willingly, write strong outreach, and follow up consistently.
  • You can build a pipeline and keep it organized without an existing sales team.
  • You're interested in AI and developer products.

Bonus

  • You've sold advertising, sponsorships or developer tools.
All roles

Full-time · San Francisco or remote

Founding Advertiser Success Manager

Customer successAccount managementAd operations

About the company

A YC-backed AI developer product used by hundreds of thousands of developers every month and growing double digits week over week. It's funded by advertising and already brings in millions in ad revenue. The team is small and includes several former YC founders, so every hire is a founding hire.

The role

Help advertisers get live, see results and keep spending. You'll own advertiser relationships day to day, from a new self-serve signup or a sales handoff through onboarding, campaign performance and repeat spend, working with the founders and the account executive.

What you'll do

  • Reach out to every new advertiser, learn their goals, and guide them through setup and launch. The bar: reply to every new signup and question within an hour.
  • Keep a clear next step on every account. Chase stalled advertisers, find out what's blocking them, and get them moving.
  • Help advertisers prepare creatives, choose campaign options and set up conversion tracking, with support from engineering.

What they're looking for

  • Experience in customer success, account management, ad operations or another customer-facing role where you owned the outcome.
  • Strong follow-through: organized, proactive, and willing to reach out again and again without waiting for the customer.
  • Clear writing and good judgment with customers, including explaining numbers, setting expectations and handling hard conversations.

Bonus

  • Experience with advertising, B2B software or developer audiences.

What success looks like

  • Faster launches, quick responses, fewer stalled accounts, better retention and growing repeat spend.
All roles

Full-time · San Francisco

Founding Growth Marketer

Paid acquisitionCreative testingFunnel optimization

About the company

A YC-backed AI developer product used by hundreds of thousands of developers every month and growing double digits week over week. It's funded by advertising and already brings in millions in ad revenue. The team is small and includes several former YC founders, so every hire is a founding hire.

The role

Own paid acquisition from the first ad to the hundredth test, working directly with the founders. You'll decide where the budget goes, build the creative engine, and make the funnel convert.

What you'll do

  • Launch and optimize paid campaigns on Meta, Google, Reddit, YouTube and X, then scale the channels that work.
  • Build a repeatable creative-testing process: write briefs and copy, work with creators and designers, and turn winners into new variations.
  • Improve every step from ad click to signup to first successful coding task to repeat use, through landing-page and onboarding experiments.
  • Own measurement and budget across paid channels.

What they're looking for

  • Hands-on experience running paid acquisition, with examples of performance you improved.
  • Creative judgment and analytical rigor: you can come up with an ad concept, launch the test and explain what happened.

Bonus

  • Curiosity about AI products and developer audiences.
  • Experience marketing a self-serve software product.
All roles

Full-time · San Francisco, in person

Special Projects Operator

OperationsRecruitingAutomationNew grads welcome

About the company

A YC-backed AI data lab in San Francisco that builds the evals and reinforcement-learning environments leading AI labs use to train and measure their models. It started with coding and is expanding into cybersecurity, law, enterprise work and AI research. It's seed-funded by a top-tier firm, has signed a multimillion-dollar contract with a major foundation lab, and has more demand than it can deliver. About a dozen people, in person.

The role

Half project manager, half builder. You'll run the network of domain experts behind the company's training data: recruiting them, keeping operations running, and building the tools that automate it. The team calls it one of the best seats in the company for learning how to start one.

What you'll do

  • Recruit experts: find the communities they belong to, build real relationships there, and bring the best people on board.
  • Design the screening process for each new domain with the research team, run it, and automate as much as you can.
  • Run the network day to day: onboarding, scheduling experts onto projects, backfilling dropouts, checking quality, running payments and answering the support inbox.
  • Build tools that replace manual steps in applications, qualification, scheduling, scoring, payments and reporting.
  • Handle the paperwork: payroll tasks, compliance filings, and setting up and removing accounts.

What they're looking for

  • 1 to 4 years in an operationally intense environment, or an exceptional track record as a new grad.
  • You build your own tools with AI. No engineering background needed, but you can read documentation and get things working on your own.
  • Excellent written and spoken communication. You'll write to experts, partners and the whole team.
  • You're comfortable with ambiguity, intensity and long stretches of hard work.

Bonus

  • You've earned a place in a community you didn't start out in, and can explain how.
  • You host events often and know how to get people to show up.
  • You come from a high-pressure, metrics-driven field like consulting or banking.

Benefits

  • Healthcare and 401(k)
  • 15 days of PTO a year
  • Free meals in the office
  • Relocation help
All roles

Full-time · San Francisco, in person

Research Engineer

TypeScriptPostgresDistributed systemsRL

About the company

A YC-backed AI data lab in San Francisco that builds the evals and reinforcement-learning environments leading AI labs use to train and measure their models. It started with coding and is expanding into cybersecurity, law, enterprise work and AI research. It's seed-funded by a top-tier firm, has signed a multimillion-dollar contract with a major foundation lab, and has more demand than it can deliver. About a dozen people, in person.

The role

Build the systems the whole company runs on, with a focus on performance, scale and simplicity. Systems thinking and attention to detail matter more here than experience with any one framework or language.

What you'll do

  • Design and build scalable systems that generate RL environments.
  • Build agentic QA systems that check environments for quality and fairness.
  • Work directly with AI researchers at leading labs to learn what makes training data effective.
  • Run petabyte-scale ETL and orchestrate millions of concurrent jobs.
  • Support new product lines as the company expands beyond coding.
  • Own security posture and compliance.

What they're looking for

  • Experience writing production software, anywhere from new grad to 10 years.
  • You've built full-stack applications in a popular language.
  • You're meticulous and build robust systems under time pressure.

Stack

  • TypeScript, React, Node.js, Postgres, Redis, Vercel, AWS, Modal, Daytona, Tinker and GRPO, plus Cursor, Claude Code and Codex.

Benefits

  • Healthcare and 401(k)
  • 15 days of PTO a year
  • Free meals in the office
  • Relocation help
All roles

Full-time · San Francisco, in person

Offensive Security RL Researcher

PentestingBug bountyAI securityPython

About the company

A YC-backed AI data lab in San Francisco that builds the evals and reinforcement-learning environments leading AI labs use to train and measure their models. It started with coding and is expanding into cybersecurity, law, enterprise work and AI research. It's seed-funded by a top-tier firm, has signed a multimillion-dollar contract with a major foundation lab, and has more demand than it can deliver. About a dozen people, in person.

The role

Lead the company's cybersecurity work. This is a security researcher first, who can also build: software is how you'll turn your research into production pipelines. If the company ever stops investing in cybersecurity, you'd move to another project, not out the door.

What you'll do

  • Set the roadmap for cybersecurity evals and environments: what to build next and where engineering time goes.
  • Build and run the systems that produce these environments, writing production code where it matters.
  • Recruit, onboard and manage part-time security experts who review environments for fairness, correctness and quality.
  • Work directly with researchers at frontier AI labs to learn which security capabilities and data they need, and sell them environments that fit.

What they're looking for

  • 3+ years in a professional security role, with a reputation in the top 5% of your peers.
  • Deep hands-on experience in at least one of: web app pentesting, bug bounty hunting, vulnerability or zero-day research, hacking agents, or AI security.
  • Standing in the security community, since you'll recruit and vet other experts.
  • You write and ship production code in Python, TypeScript or similar. A decade of engineering isn't required, but you maintain the systems your research depends on.
  • Strong writing: you can justify priorities to researchers and explain findings to non-specialists.

Bonus

  • A public bug bounty record, live-hacking event invites, Pwn2Own placements or published original research. Link a write-up of your best bugs in your résumé.
  • You've managed or mentored security researchers.
  • You've thought hard about how to grade security work beyond pass/fail.
  • You've built tools to automate your own research.

Also

  • The company will sponsor and co-publish AI security research under your name.

Benefits

  • Healthcare and 401(k)
  • 15 days of PTO a year
  • Free meals in the office
  • Relocation help

What to record

About 60 seconds, in three beats.

Your résumé says where you've been. The video shows how you think. You don't need a script.

  1. 0:00

    Who you are

    Your name, where you're based, and what you're doing right now.

  2. 0:15

    Your proof

    The one thing you've done that shows what you're great at: a deal you closed, a campaign you scaled, a system you built, a bug you found. Say what happened.

  3. 0:45

    What you want next

    The kind of role and team you're looking for, and what you'd want to own in your first few months.

A few things I've learned

  • Your phone is fine. Good light and clear sound matter more than a nice camera.
  • One take is fine. Specific beats polished.
  • Numbers help. "Booked 40 meetings in a quarter" lands harder than "strong at outbound."
  • One video covers every role. I'll send it to every hiring manager whose role fits your skills.

Apply

Show them who you are.

Add one video and your résumé. That's the whole application, for every role.

I watch every video and send it to every hiring manager whose role fits your skills. When one wants to meet you, I'll email you the company name and set up the call.

Wendy Shifounder, Scout22

Got it.

Your application is in. I'll review it soon, and if it's a fit I'll email you about next steps.

Roles you're interested inOptional. Pick any that fit, or leave it blank and I'll match you. One video covers them all.

Your video, about 60 seconds

Your résumé


I only share your video and résumé with hiring managers whose roles fit you. Privacy Policy

For startups

Hiring after a raise?

I find early-career and founding hires for AI startups that just raised. Tell me who you need, and I'll send you people I'd bet on and make the intro.

Tell me who you're hiring