Working at YNDR.
Small operator-led firm. We hire when we have to, and when we do we hire people who build AND advise. The same person who sits in the strategy conversation writes the agent that puts it in production.
No bench. No farm of specialists waiting to be billed out. If you are looking for a role where you ship code one day and sit on a board call the next, this is the room. If you are looking for a lane to specialize into and stay in, it is not.
One discipline. Both halves of the work.
YNDR is small and stays small on purpose. The roster is operators who can sit in a board conversation in the morning and ship a pull request in the afternoon. That is the discipline the firm is built around. Strategy and code from the same head, on the same engagement, with the same throat to choke when something has to change.
That means autonomy is high. Engagements are owned end-to-end. The person who decided what the agent should do is the person who wrote the handbook, the eval set, and the human SOP. There is no handoff to a separate delivery team because there is no separate delivery team. The work is the work.
It also means the bar for joining is unusually narrow. Most engineers we talk to are happiest specializing. Most strategists we talk to do not want their hands in the codebase. The people who fit at YNDR are the ones who refuse both lanes. They see the deck and the running system as a single artifact that has to tell one honest story.
Five principles we hire against.
These are not nice-to-haves. If you can point to a stretch of your career where each one was true under pressure, we should probably talk. If you cannot, the chemistry will not hold.
Operator mindset, not consultant mindset.
We are not paid to draft a recommendation and walk away. We are paid because the agent is running, the metric is moving, and the people whose names are on the system are sleeping at night. Bring that lens to every meeting and every pull request.
You ship code.
Strategy without shipping is a deck. The same person who maps the workflow writes the agent. If you can only do one half of the work, this is not the firm for you. The point of YNDR is the line between the two has been erased on purpose.
You can sit in a strategy conversation.
An operating partner asks a hard question about build vs. buy. You answer in plain English without hiding behind jargon. Then you go back to the codebase and ship the thing you just argued for. That is the bar.
You explain your work.
Every agent ships with a handbook the agent follows and an ops manual the human supervisors follow. The same discipline applies to you. Your commits, your decisions, your trade-offs, written down clearly enough that the person next to you can pick the work up cold.
You do not outsource the thinking.
Models help. They do not absolve. The hard calls about what to ship, what to refuse, where the kill switch lives, who carries the pager, those stay with the operator. If your instinct is to defer that judgment to a tool, YNDR is the wrong room.
We are not actively hiring right now.
That is the honest answer most of the year. YNDR runs lean on purpose. We hire when the engagement load forces our hand, and we hire one operator at a time. There is no graduate program, no rolling pipeline, no quarterly headcount plan we are trying to fill.
What we do keep is a short list. When the next hire happens it comes off that list, not off a job board. If the work in the sections above resonates, if you have shipped operational agents and you have sat across the table from an operator and held your ground, send a note. We will write back, and if the timing is wrong now we will tell you so and stay in touch.
Send a note. Tell us what you've shipped.
One paragraph is plenty. The operational agent you put in production. The strategy call you carried. The decision you would still defend. If the work and the principles line up, we will find a thirty-minute window and trade notes. If they do not, we will say so.