SECTION I · THE BRIEF
Brief #64200Updated 21 AUG 2026SAN FRANCISCO, CAYcY COMBINATOR
Employbl Company Profile

Founding Software Engineer

Stardrift is an AI travel planner, helping travelers find and book flights, hotels and activities for their vacations.

Location
San Francisco, CA
Company size
1–10
Posted
3d ago
Via
Yc
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  • 02Seniority & experience requirementsLocked
  • 03Interview process & rubricLocked
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  • 06Offer & decision timelineLocked
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Founding Software Engineer · Stardrift

View company profile
Job title
Founding Software Engineer
Job location
San Francisco, CA, US
Job listing URL
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stardrift/jobs/nC7cjhB-founding-software-engineer
Job description
We are building a world-class search booking experience. In our vision of the world, you won’t book travel by opening ten tabs in Google Flights; you’ll book through a personalized AI assistant that understands everything about you and automatically arranges your trip for you. We're looking for a founding engineer to join the our team of 3-4. You'll tackle everything from optimizing LLM performance and building evals to integrating APIs like Amadeus and Duffel. We have no shortage of customer interest and are bottlenecked entirely on product development. Your job will be to take customer feedback and improve our product, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the founder & the rest of founding team. ### You’re a good fit if… * **You are a backend engineer who is full-stack curious.** You aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty in the rest of the stack—whether that’s writing complex React code, developing a data pipeline from scratch or configuring nginx. * **You design simple, elegant solutions to complex problems**. Bonus if you’re mathematically capable. * **You work fast _and_ produce good code.** * **You are comfortable with uncertainty**. We pivot weekly based on customer feedback; you’re aren’t too attached to specific features or directions. * **You are detail-obsessed.** You think through every edge case before shipping. * **You are scrappy, intense, and stubborn about solving problems**. You drive your projects through to completion. You can set direction, make judgement calls and drive projects forward without waiting for perfect clarity. * **You’re AI-native**. You’re not afraid to read an ML paper or two if needed, and you know when to incorporate it into code. * **You've shipped an LLM app.** Send us the link—we'll try it and respond. * **You’re quietly brilliant.** You don’t think of yourself this way, but your friends and colleagues all think you’re incredibly smart. You’re low-ego about your work. you care primarily about finding the best solution to the problem, and not about being right all the time. * **You’re communicative.** You write clear PRs, ask for help when stuck, defend your decisions, and update when wrong. * **You're kind and considerate.** We work hard, but we're humans first. We look out for each other and assume good intent. **Bonus**: * You appreciate good design (UX, graphic or systems) * 300+ hours in planes Our strongest candidates usually attended top schools (Berkeley, CMU, Waterloo, MIT) or worked at top companies. ### About us We are a very small, close and ambitious team. We work in-person in San Francisco, five days a week out of an office in the Mission. We start at 10am and stay until the work is done—sometimes 7pm, sometimes midnight. Our stack is a fairly standard setup of Postgres/FastAPI/Next. We wish we could write more Rust, but don’t often get the chance to. We have unlimited vacation and a flexible travel policy. If you want to travel home and work remotely for a week, that’s cool as long as you’re still getting things done at a good pace (and tax/labor laws permit). We can’t provide fully hybrid or remote work arrangements.
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Where this role is based

San Francisco, CA

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Stardrift headquarters

San Francisco, CA

Company size

1–10 employees

Founded

2025

Total raised

$500,000

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Funding rounds

  • Pre Seed$500K

Investors

Y Combinator