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Y/n, Engineering
Founding Engineer at Y/n
- Location
- San Francisco, United States
- Compensation
- $120k-$300k + Equity
Founding Engineer ($120k-$300k + Equity) at Y/n. Join a $14M seed-stage startup backed by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins that recently hit #4 on the App Store. With over 100,000 daily users spending hours playing interactive stories, Y/n is serving 2 trillion AI tokens monthly with just a team of three.
As a founding engineer, you’ll own the infrastructure and recommendation engines behind this massive entertainment machine. If you’re a builder who loves fandom and high-scale systems, this is your chance to shape the next century of storytelling alongside the former founding designer of Substack and an AI visionary.
What's the next step?
This role is no longer actively hiring, but Jack can still help you discover similar open roles that fit.
Role overview
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.
About Y/n
Y/n is the most entertaining app in the world.
On Y/n, you play a character in a story. Be a boarding school transfer student and get the boys to fall in love with you, or figure out a jailbreak with Sherlock Holmes.
Your choices change the story and how characters feel about you (oops!) – so no two playthroughs are the same (but you can rewind).
■ Play interactive romance, drama, fanfiction, mysteries, fantasy, fluff (or angst), and more. ■ Discover 1M+ stories written by the community. ■ Write and publish your own interactive stories.
Download Y/n and try for yourself!
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.
Who this is a fit for
- 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.
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.
How Jack & Jill work together

What happens next?
Jack’s an AI agent for job searching and career coaching. He works for you.
Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack’s network.
If your profile’s a match and Y/n wants to meet, Jill will make the intro. In the meantime, Jack will send you excellent alternatives.