YC hiring posts are overwhelmingly AI and infrastructure

Scanning the YC hiring board attached to today's front page, the overwhelming majority of open roles are in AI engineering, ML, and infrastructure. Companies like Mbodi AI (robotics ML), Arc Prize Foundation (ARC-AGI platform engineering), Trellis AI (self-improving agents), and Terranox AI are all hiring founding-level technical roles. There are also several Berlin-based onsite roles, suggesting European hiring is picking up among YC-backed companies.

The roles skew heavily toward founding engineers and senior technical hires, with very few growth or sales roles relative to the engineering volume. This suggests these companies are still in the build-and-validate phase rather than scaling go-to-market. The salary signals are wide: Proliferate lists $200K for junior engineers, which is either a typo or a deliberate signal about competition for early talent.

Notably, several companies are hiring explicitly for 'open source loving' engineers (Skyvern) or engineers who can contribute to open source projects (Proliferate is building 'open source Codex'). Open source as a go-to-market strategy is embedded in the hiring criteria, not just the marketing copy.