Becoming a founding engineer at a YC startup

[Music] Everyone, thanks for joining. I'm Paige from Y Combinator on our work at a startup team. Um, that's the site that our portfolio companies use to hire people and the site that candidates can go to get jobs at YC startups. With us today, we have three guests who are all early and founding engineers at YC companies. I'm going to let them introduce themselves and then they'll kind of share a bit about their backgrounds, their companies, and then we'll dive into Q&A after that.

Awesome, thanks Paige. Um, yeah, my name is Gar. I work at Cambly, and we're an English tutoring company. We connect English tutors with students around the world via video chat to learn English. I joined Cambly in 2014, so I've been there for eight years. I was the first full-time engineering hire, and now we have an engineering team of 25 engineers, and I lead that team. Before this, I was at Google, which is where I met one of the founders of Cambly, which is how I came to join Cambly.

Hi, I'm Jen. I'm a software engineer at Findlay. Like I said, I've been working here since October last year. Finley is creating debt capital management software, and so we're just trying to streamline the process for a lot of these very manual financial processes for our customers. Before working at Findlay, for joining last October, I used to be more of a consulting software engineer, and so worked on projects here and there. In my past life, I like to say I was a molecular biology researcher, so I was the leader in life career switcher. But loving it so far, and I've always kind of coded in my free time. So living the dream, getting paid for a hobby.

So hey, I'm Jordan. I'm an engineer at Explo. I've been in Xflow since April of 2021, so about a year and a half now. At Explo, we let you make customer-facing dashboards that you can embed regardless of your database. Just kind of like fully customizable dashboards that can fit in your website. Before I was at Xflow, I was at this other company, Applied Protective Technologies. I was on like the architecture team for that company, and I was getting to maintain and build features on all these cool core components that our platform was running on. But I wasn't getting to build any of those, and I wasn't getting to—like I was working with the people who had built the foundation, but I really wanted to be that person who had built the foundation. So I found out about Xflow, and it sounded like a great opportunity to start learning how to do that—learning how to build an email system, a job queue, deployment infrastructure, all that stuff. And it's been a pretty cool journey since then.

Great, thank you. So maybe we will start with what I assume everyone on the call wants to know. Uh, what is a founding engineer and what does that kind of mean to you when you hear someone say that or talk about that, or you can see that in a job description?

Yes, I don’t know about the rest of you all, but this is the, at least, a text guy, this is the first startup that I'm working for as a software engineer. So before joining this call and I mean when I was job searching, I kind of googled, what does that even mean? Like, what is a founding engineer? Um, and like Google likes to say that it is kind of early engineers who not only contribute technically but also set the tone of what kind of the engineering culture is like at a company. So I don't know for Gar and Jordan, who probably have more experience than me, do you find that to be true or what has your experience been?

No, I think that's totally true. Like, when I was looking for jobs, I never thought I would work at a startup, just I didn't think I necessarily had the skills toolkit to kind of have that responsibility, especially as a founding engineer. But I realized like really quickly that a lot of it does come down to that. Like, you are helping define not just your engineering but a lot of your culture, and like I think that is somewhere that I like do bring a lot and I do excel. So I like totally agree. I think that when you're a founding en...