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?

Published postings follow nomad-agent-job-row-v1. The shared fields carry source identity, title and company, parsed locations, dates, the complete plain-text body when available, source markup when usable, and work type. Unavailable scalar facts are null; no parsed location is []. Source-only facts appear in versioned custom.data only when mapped there. See the Output example section for the exact dataset fields and diagnostic rows.

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.
postedWithin	string	any	Keep only jobs published inside this window. Use any for no date filter, or a duration — 1h, 24h, 3d, 2w, 6m. Jobs the source published no date for are kept rather than dropped. The Work at a Startup search and detail APIs do not expose a posting date today, so every posting is treated as undated and kept; the window takes effect once a posting date is available.
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

Every row follows nomad-agent-job-row-v1, the one shape shared by all of this fleet's job Actors. A row carries every field; null means the source did not publish that fact, and locations: [] means no usable location was parsed from the posting. Nothing is guessed.

{
  "schemaVersion": "nomad-agent-job-row-v1",
  "recordType": "posting",
  "source": "ycombinator_was",
  "id": "a1b2c3",
  "url": "https://example.com/ycombinator_was/jobs/a1b2c3",
  "title": "Senior Backend Engineer",
  "company": "Example Company",
  "locations": [
    "Bilbao",
    "Spain"
  ],
  "postedAt": "2026-09-02T00:00:00Z",
  "deadline": null,
  "description": "The complete posting body as plain text, exactly as the source published it — never truncated.",
  "descriptionHtml": "<p>The complete posting body as the source's own markup.</p>",
  "workType": "remote",
  "custom": {
    "schemaId": "nomad-agent-job-custom-ycombinator-was-v1",
    "data": {
      "companySlug": "…",
      "companyBatch": "…",
      "equity": "…"
    }
  },
  "applyUrl": null,
  "companyBatch": null,
  "companyDescription": null,
  "companyDescriptionHtml": null,
  "companyIndustry": null,
  "companyLastActiveAt": null,
  "companyLocation": null,
  "companyLogo": null,
  "companySlug": null,
  "companyTagline": null,
  "companyTeamSize": null,
  "companyTechDescription": null,
  "companyTechDescriptionHtml": null,
  "companyWebsite": null,
  "customQuestions": null,
  "equity": null,
  "experience": null,
  "founders": [],
  "interviewProcess": null,
  "interviewProcessHtml": null,
  "isRemote": null,
  "jobType": null,
  "location": null,
  "roleType": null,
  "salary": null,
  "salaryCurrency": null,
  "salaryMax": null,
  "salaryMin": null,
  "salaryPeriod": null,
  "skills": [],
  "snippet": null,
  "visaSponsorship": null
}

Field	Meaning
schemaVersion	Always "nomad-agent-job-row-v1".
recordType	"posting" for a job, "diagnostic" for a row reporting something about the run itself.
source	Which job source the posting came from, from the collector registry's vocabulary — not the Actor name.
id	Stable identifier for the posting within source.
url	Canonical public URL of the posting on the source site.
title	Job title exactly as the source publishes it, untruncated.
company	Employer name as published.
locations	Places the role is based, most specific first — e.g. ["Bilbao", "Spain"].
postedAt	When the source published the posting, ISO-8601 UTC (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ).
deadline	Closing date for applications as an ISO-8601 calendar date (YYYY-MM-DD).
description	The complete posting body as plain text — never truncated, never summarised.
descriptionHtml	The posting body as the source's own markup, preserving lists, headings and links.
workType	Working arrangement: "remote", "hybrid" or "onsite".
custom	Facts only this source publishes, as {"schemaId", "data"}.

Deprecated fields

This Actor is on a paid integration contract, so the fields it published before this shape are still emitted alongside the ones above during a transition window, unchanged:

applyUrl companyBatch companyDescription companyDescriptionHtml companyIndustry companyLastActiveAt companyLocation companyLogo companySlug companyTagline companyTeamSize companyTechDescription companyTechDescriptionHtml companyWebsite customQuestions equity experience founders interviewProcess interviewProcessHtml isRemote jobType location roleType salary salaryCurrency salaryMax salaryMin salaryPeriod skills snippet visaSponsorship

They will be removed once the integrations reading them have moved. Nothing above changes when they go.

A run also emits diagnostic rows — recordType: "diagnostic" with a warnings array — when it has something to report, such as a source returning nothing. They are never billed and are easy to filter out on recordType.

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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