🚀 Proliferate (YC S25) is Recruiting

Founding Product Engineer | Build the future of agentic work

📋 Position Overview

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🌐 About Proliferate

Proliferate is developing an open-source, self-hostable AI IDE designed for seamless collaboration between humans and AI agents.

"We believe the future of all work is companies staffed by thousands of agents and we’re building the platform that manages them."

While we are starting with an IDE, our long-term trajectory is to create the fundamental substrate that allows enterprises to deploy agents for actual production work. We are currently in the early stages—the product is raw, and our goals are massive.

Our Backing:

• True Ventures
• Pear VC
• A network of 50+ YC founders

The Vision Roadmap

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👤 Meet the Founder: Pablo Hansen

Pablo's trajectory is defined by extreme acceleration:

• Age 17: Completed Bachelor's degree.
• Age 18: Operated a consulting firm.
• Age 19: Earned a Master's in AI.
• Post-Grad: Joined Onyx (YC W24) as the first engineer, spending a year developing enterprise-grade AI search.

Pablo founded Proliferate because it represents the most ambitious challenge he could imagine—so much so that he accepted rejected eight-figure acquisition offers to continue this mission.

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🛠️ The Role: Founding Product Engineer

As one of the inaugural engineers, you will work in lockstep with the founder. You won't just be writing code; you'll be owning entire product verticals from conception to deployment.

Your weekly cadence might include:

• Rapid Prototyping: Turning a raw customer pain point into a polished feature within days.
• Interface Design: Creating new UX patterns for human-agent collaboration based on model updates that dropped 72 hours ago.
• Workflow Automation: Converting manual company or engineering processes into autonomous, agent-led workflows.

Our Engineering Philosophy:

• First Principles: We don't do things "because that's how they're done."
• Deep Work: We protect long, uninterrupted blocks of focus.
• Intentionality: We use agents liberally, but we are purposeful about how we use them.
• Mindset: We are deeply AGI-pilled. We ship with velocity and dream on a grand scale, but we distinguish between ambition and grandiosity, and speed and recklessness.

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🍎 Culture & Perks

We view high performance as a core cultural pillar and invest in the long-term health of our team.

• Wellness:
  • Free wearable tech (e.g., Whoop).
  • Premium gym memberships (e.g., Equinox).
• Fuel: Office meals provided (Expect a high volume of Sweetgreen).
• Focus: Mornings are strictly reserved for deep work; meetings are banned during this time unless absolutely necessary.

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🎯 Who You Are

You are an ideal candidate if:

1. Your learning curve is $\text{vertical}$ (you learn frighteningly fast).
2. You have experience taking a product from $0 \rightarrow 1$.
3. You are a "power user" of AI tools and have strong opinions on their current limitations.
4. You crave extreme ownership and a high density of learning.
5. You want your contributions to have an immediate, visible impact on an ambitious project.

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🏁 The Interview Process

We keep our process lean and practical:

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🏢 Company Snapshot

• Founded: 2025
• Batch: YC S25
• Status: Active
• HQ: San Francisco, CA

# Proliferate Mission Statement
def company_goal():
    vision = "Build the substrate for agentic work"
    current_product = "Open-source AI IDE"
    return f"Starting with {current_product} to achieve {vision}."

print(company_goal())