About the role
Hi, my name is Gabriel and I'm the co-founder of Y/n.
Y/n is an app where you play the main character in a story written for you. Be the new kid at a boarding school and get everyone to fall for you, or plan a jailbreak with Sherlock Holmes. Every text you send changes the plot and how characters feel about you, so no two playthroughs are the same.
Our mission at Y/n is to create the most entertaining storyteller in the world, and give it to everyone.
Why you should join us
- People love Y/n:
- Users spend on average 3+ hours playing Y/n everyday
- We are top #10 books apps in the world (reached #4 app in the App Store last month), even though we just launched
- We raised $14M from top VCs
- We work on interesting technical problems:
- We serve ~3T tokens (~300M user messages, growing 40% MoM) per month with a team of 4
- We manage a LOT of compute!
- Training an AI to be fun and creative is incredibly interesting
- The founders + team are fun to work with:
- My co-founder Eric trained the first-ever image editing AI in the world
- Before Y/n, I was the founding designer and one of the first employees at Substack, where I learned a lot about product and media
- Together, we previously co-founded Can of Soup, a hit AI image sharing app, which you can read about in the New York Times
Some examples of what you would do
You'd be one of our first engineers, with real ownership across the product and the infrastructure. In practice that could mean:
- Building our personalized recommendation system infrastructure
- Building features in our mobile and web application
The role will adapt and grow as we do, so don’t worry if you haven’t worked on recommender systems or ML yet!
What we’re looking for
- You’ve built actual infrastructure (not just pushed to Vercel)
- You’ve worked at a startup or built meaningful side projects
- Optional: you’re into fandom, reading, games, or fanfiction!
- You're willing to relocate to San Francisco. If you do not have US work authorization, we can help with that
About Y/n
Y/n (yn.app) is an interactive fanfiction platform where users play as the 'Y/N' (your name) protagonist inside community-written and AI-assisted text stories, making choices that affect character responses and plotlines. The app features 1M+ community-generated stories, a multiplayer/social layer, and a deep fanfiction-native identity. Operated by legal entity Emittance Inc., the company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch and has grown to 100K+ daily active users averaging 3+ hours per day. The company describes its mission as building 'the entertainment machine' — the most engaging consumer entertainment product in the world.
Other roles at Y/n
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Job details
Salary
$120,000 - $300,000
Equity
0.5% - 2%
Location
Remote
Experience
1+ years
Funding
Total raised
$14M
Last stage
Seed
Investors
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.