Founding Engineer at Proliferate | Y Combinator

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.

About the interview

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**

About Proliferate

![Image 6: Proliferate](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/proliferate)

Proliferate

Founded:2025

Batch:S25

Status:Active

Location:San Francisco

[](https://proliferate.com/?utm_source=yc&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=profile)[](https://www.linkedin.com/company/107275953)![Image 7: Twitter account](https://x.com/proliferateai)

Founders

!Image 8: Pablo Hansen

Pablo Hansen

![Image 9: Twitter account](https://x.com/thepablohansen)[](https://linkedin.com/in/pablo-hansen)

Founder

!Image 10: Pablo Hansen

Pablo Hansen

![Image 11: Twitter account](https://x.com/thepablohansen)[](https://linkedin.com/in/pablo-hansen)

Founder

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