Y Combinator Jobs Scraper — Work at a Startup

Fetch live openings at Y Combinator startups from Work at a Startup (workatastartup.com) as structured JSON.

Claude / Codex skill to describe and setup this actor: SKILL.md

Work at a Startup (workatastartup.com) is Y Combinator's official jobs marketplace, where current YC-backed companies post engineering, product, sales, design and operations roles. This Actor queries its public search API to find openings, then enriches each one from its public detail page — so every YC job comes back as a flat JSON record with structured salary, equity, visa, skills, full description and the hiring company's profile, without scraping HTML yourself or logging in.

What Y Combinator jobs data does this scraper extract?

Each result is one flat JSON record per job posting:

Field	Meaning
title	Job title as posted
company	Hiring company / organisation
companySlug	Company's slug on Work at a Startup
companyBatch	YC batch code (e.g. S23)
location	Location / duty station (may include remote hints)
isRemote	true when the location advertises a remote option
roleType	Role category as tagged by the source (e.g. Machine learning)
jobType	Employment type, normalised (Full-time, Contract, Internship, Part-time)
salary	Salary text exactly as published (e.g. $150K - $220K)
salaryMin / salaryMax	Numeric salary bounds parsed from the text (K expanded)
salaryCurrency / salaryPeriod	ISO currency (USD, INR, …) and period (year, month, …)
equity	Equity range (e.g. 0.10% - 0.50%) — detail enrichment
visaSponsorship	Visa policy (e.g. Will sponsor) — detail enrichment
experience	Minimum experience (e.g. 3+ years) — detail enrichment
skills	Skill tags array (e.g. ["Figma", "Machine Learning"]) — detail enrichment
description / descriptionHtml	Full job description, plain text and HTML — detail enrichment
interviewProcess / interviewProcessHtml	Full interview process, plain text and source HTML — when published
companyTagline	Company one-liner
companyDescription / companyDescriptionHtml	Company hiring pitch — detail enrichment
companyTechDescription / companyTechDescriptionHtml	Full company technology narrative — when published
companyIndustry	YC industry classification — detail enrichment
companyLogo	Company logo URL
companyWebsite	Company website — detail enrichment
companyLocation / companyTeamSize	Company HQ + headcount — detail enrichment
founders	Founder profiles (name, avatar, LinkedIn, past companies) — detail enrichment
customQuestions	Source-owned public application-question objects, preserved verbatim; [] means explicitly empty and null means the source omitted the collection
applyUrl	Work at a Startup application link
url	Direct link to the posting
postedAt	Always null — the source exposes no per-listing posting date (see companyLastActiveAt)
snippet	Compatibility body field: full available job/interview/company narrative, or a short fallback context when a detail page has no narrative
id	Stable source-side identifier
source	Fixed value "ycombinator_was"

Every returned row is detail-enriched. includeJobDetails remains an accepted legacy compatibility input, but false is intentionally ignored: a search card is not a complete job record.

Coverage — the whole board, not just engineering

Work at a Startup's public search endpoint returns a fixed, unpaginated result set per search term, so a scraper's coverage is decided entirely by how many terms it fans out across. This Actor sweeps 62 role, stack, function and seniority terms, then deduplicates by job ID:

• The source response size and deduplicated job count are live values, not a promise. A full Actor run additionally requires a successful detail page with a non-empty job description.
• Every role family the board tags — not just engineering. Sales, marketing, design, recruiting, finance, operations, QA, hardware and embedded roles are all reachable.
• Every returned job is detail-enriched (descriptions, skills, equity, visa, founders), fetched concurrently rather than one at a time.

Set maxItems to cap the run — it stops fanning out as soon as the cap is met and only touches the first few search terms. Runtime depends on current source latency and detail-page availability.

How to scrape Y Combinator jobs with this Actor

1. Click Try for free / Run — no login to the target site, no cookies, no proxies to configure.
2. Adjust the input (keyword, filters, maxItems) or keep the defaults.
3. Run it and export the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it over the API.

Run it from your own code:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("nomad-agent/ycombinator-was-scraper").call(run_input={"maxItems": 50})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"], "—", item["company"], item["url"])

Or a single HTTP call that runs the Actor and returns items in one response:

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nomad-agent~ycombinator-was-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"maxItems": 50}'

Integrations

Chain this Actor with Zapier, Make, Slack, Airtable and Google Sheets via Apify's built-in integrations, schedule recurring runs with the Apify Scheduler, or pull results straight into your own pipeline with the Apify API.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
queries	array	(built-in set)	Role-specific search terms to fan out across; each fetches an independent page, merged and deduplicated by job ID.
includeJobDetails	boolean	true	Deprecated compatibility input. The Actor always fetches the detail page and drops incomplete stubs; false is ignored.
titleExclude	array	[]	Skip postings whose title contains any of these terms (case-insensitive).
jobTypes	array	[]	Keep only these employment types (Full-time, Contract, Internship, Part-time).
companyBatches	array	[]	Keep only these YC batches (e.g. S23, W24).
roleTypes	array	[]	Keep only role categories containing these terms (e.g. machine learning, frontend).
remoteOnly	boolean	false	Keep only postings whose location advertises a remote option.
maxItems	integer	50	Max unique postings to return. Set 0 for no limit.
cacheTtlSeconds	integer	1800	Cache upstream fetches (search + detail) for this many seconds; re-runs within the window skip the network. 0 disables.
analyticsEnabled (Privacy)	boolean	false	Opt in to privacy-safe aggregate debug analytics sent to the Actor creator's Netcup receiver. No caller IDs, searches, filters, records, URLs, source text, raw errors or credentials are sent.

Output example

{
  "id": "73211",
  "title": "Founding Engineer",
  "company": "Lindy",
  "companySlug": "lindy",
  "companyBatch": "S23",
  "location": "San Francisco, CA, US / Remote (US)",
  "isRemote": true,
  "roleType": "Machine learning",
  "jobType": "Full-time",
  "salary": "$150K - $220K",
  "salaryMin": 150000,
  "salaryMax": 220000,
  "salaryCurrency": "USD",
  "salaryPeriod": "year",
  "equity": "0.10% - 0.50%",
  "visaSponsorship": "Will sponsor",
  "experience": "3+ years",
  "skills": ["Python", "Machine Learning"],
  "description": "We're building an AI executive assistant…",
  "descriptionHtml": "<p>We're building an AI executive assistant…</p>",
  "companyTagline": "AI executive assistant for busy professionals.",
  "companyIndustry": "B2B -> Engineering, Product and Design",
  "companyLogo": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/…png",
  "companyWebsite": "https://www.lindy.ai/",
  "companyTeamSize": 25,
  "founders": [{"name": "Flo Crivello", "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/…"}],
  "applyUrl": "https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/73211",
  "postedAt": null,
  "url": "https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/73211",
  "source": "ycombinator_was"
}

postedAt is always null — neither the Work at a Startup search API nor the detail page exposes a per-listing posting date. companyLastActiveAt is included as a company-level freshness proxy where the source provides it.

Pricing

Check the Actor's Apify Store page for the current price and billing model before running it. Store pricing and plan discounts can change; the Actor itself has no separate input-based surcharge.

Use cases

• Startup job boards and newsletters
• Tracking YC-company hiring by batch
• Sourcing candidates who want startup roles
• VC portfolio talent intelligence

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Y Combinator jobs? This Actor reads only publicly available job postings — data any visitor can see without logging in. No personal data behind authentication is touched. Review the target site's terms and your local regulations for your specific use case.

Do I need an account on the target site? No. Postings are fetched from public pages/APIs — no login, cookies or session tokens.

How fresh is the data? Every run fetches live listings. Results are cached for cacheTtlSeconds (default 30 min, set 0 to always hit the source live).

How many jobs can I get? maxItems caps the run (set 0 for no cap). The Work at a Startup search endpoint returns a fixed, unpaginated result set per query, so coverage is widened by fanning out across more queries terms, not by raising maxItems.

Does it cover every YC batch? Yes — results span all companies currently posting on Work at a Startup, across every batch. Use queries to target roles, companyBatches / roleTypes / jobTypes / remoteOnly to filter, and titleExclude to drop titles you don't want.

Something broken or missing? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab — it is monitored and reliability fixes ship fast.

Is this Actor useful to you? A quick ⭐ review on the Actor's Reviews tab helps other startup-job hunters find it — and tells us what to build next.

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