Editorial Researcher

Y Combinator is the leading startup accelerator for entrepreneurs. Since 2005, YC has invested in over 6,000 companies, including Airbnb, Dropbox, OpenAI, Stripe, Reddit, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Instacart. Today, YC has built the most powerful startup community in the world and is committed to supporting founders for the life of their company.

Job Description

Y Combinator is looking for an Editorial Researcher to join the YC Media team. We make content for people who are curious about startups, technology, AI, science, and the future. That includes videos and podcasts, essays, original research, and new projects built around the enormous amount of knowledge and data that exists inside YC.

We're looking for someone who is unusually curious, technically inclined, and a very good writer. You should be able to understand a complicated idea, figure out what's actually interesting about it, and explain it simply without dumbing it down.

This isn't a traditional writing or editing job. You'll research stories, analyze data, develop ideas with YC partners and founders, help shape videos and podcasts, write and edit articles, and experiment with new kinds of editorial projects.

What you'll do

• Research, write, and edit YC’s written content.
• Develop ideas and do research for YC videos, podcasts, interviews, and other media.
• Work directly with YC partners, founders, and the rest of the Media team to turn interesting ideas into great content.
• Dig into data to find surprising trends about startups, technology, founders, and what people are building.
• Find interesting people, projects, papers, companies, and ideas before everyone else is talking about them.
• Help us figure out what YC should be covering and why.
• Take complicated technical subjects and make them clear, accurate, and interesting.
• Experiment with new editorial formats and ways of telling stories.

You might be a good fit if

• You're deeply curious about technology and understand the culture around startups, AI, engineering, and the internet.
• You're an excellent writer and editor. You can make complicated things simple without making them simplistic.
• You're technical enough to talk to engineers and researchers and understand what they're actually saying.
• You like going down rabbit holes, reading papers, digging through datasets, talking to experts, and figuring things out for yourself.
• You have strong editorial judgment. You can recognize when something is genuinely interesting rather than merely popular.
• You're comfortable working across formats. An idea might become a Substack post, a YouTube video, a podcast conversation, a chart, or something we haven't tried yet.
• You're opinionated about media and the internet and have good instincts about what smart people actually want to read and watch.
• You don't need someone to hand you a story. You find them.

There isn't one obvious background for this role. You might be an engineer who loves writing, someone from developer relations, a technical journalist, a data journalist, a researcher, a former founder, or someone who has worked at a think tank. We're much more interested in how you think, how you write, and what you've made than what your previous title was.

Above all, we're looking for someone who is smart, curious, technically adventurous, and wants to make things that smart people genuinely want to read and watch.

Location: YC is headquartered in San Francisco, and candidates must reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our Media Team works from our Dogpatch offices in San Francisco at least three days per week, with additional in-office days as filming schedules require. Some projects may also require travel and weekend work.

Compensation: $180,000-$200,000 salary (depending on skills and experience).

Benefits: Our full benefits package includes medical, vision, and dental plans, an infertility benefit, STD/LTD, life insurance, commuter benefits, a flexible spending account, a health savings account, a 401(k) with 4% matching, generous parental leave, paid holidays, and a flexible paid time off policy.

Work Authorization: This position does not support work authorization/visa sponsorship.

Y Combinator considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law, including San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance. Y Combinator is committed to protecting the privacy of job applicants' personal information and to complying with the California Consumer Privacy Act. The privacy policy of Ashby, Inc., the hiring platform used by Y Combinator, governs the collection of such data and is available here.