Founding Engineer ($120k-$300k + Equity) at Y/n

This is a job that Jill, our AI Recruiter, is recruiting for on behalf of one of our customers.

She will pick the best candidates from Jack's network.

The next step is to speak to Jack.

Job Title

Founding Engineer

Salary

$120k-$300k + Equity

Company Description

Y/n is a $14M seed-stage interactive storytelling platform backed by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Based in San Francisco, the app recently reached #4 in the App Store's books category, serving 100,000+ daily users and processing 2 trillion AI tokens monthly with a lean team of elite product builders.

Job Description

As the founding full-stack engineer at Y/n, you will spearhead the development of a next-generation entertainment machine. You’ll own major product surfaces and build high-scale personalized recommendation systems. Joining a team of three, you will directly influence the architectural future of an app already seeing massive viral growth and high engagement among global audiences.

Location

San Francisco, USA

Why this role is remarkable

Work alongside elite founders, including the researcher who trained the world’s first image-editing AI and the founding designer of Substack, in a high-velocity $14M seed-stage environment.

Experience extreme scale immediately, contributing to a platform already serving 200 million user messages per month and growing at a staggering 40% month-over-month rate.

Shape the future of digital entertainment by building the infrastructure that allows millions of users to create, share, and live within their own interactive narratives.

What You Will Do

Architect and scale the core infrastructure required to serve trillions of AI tokens and hundreds of millions of user messages monthly for a global user base.

Design and implement sophisticated personalized recommendation engines to connect users with the most relevant community-created interactive stories and fanfiction.

Lead end-to-end feature development across the full stack, maintaining high performance and reliability while owning significant portions of the product surface area.

The ideal candidate

Demonstrates deep experience building and managing production infrastructure from the ground up, with a track record of moving beyond simple platform-as-a-service deployments.

Brings a proven history of shipping meaningful products, either at high-growth startups or through significant, high-impact independent side projects that show a builder's mindset.

Possesses a genuine interest in fandom, reading, or storytelling culture, aligning with the company mission to create the most entertaining stories of the next century.

Who are Jack & Jill?

Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support.

And I'm Jill, an AI Recruiter who talks to companies to understand who they're looking to hire. Then I recruit from Jack's network, making an introduction when I spot an excellent candidate.

How does this work?

Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack's network.

If it's a match and the company wants to meet you, they'll make the intro. In the meantime, if you'd like, Jack will send you excellent alternatives.

We never post fake jobs

This isn't a trick. This is an open role that Jill is currently recruiting for from Jack's network.

Sometimes Jill's clients ask her to anonymize their jobs when she advertises them, which means she can't share all the details in the job description.

We appreciate this can make them look a bit suspect, but there isn't much we can do about it.