December 2, 2025
Apply to build your robot boss
Delty (YC X25) Is Hiring
Ex-Googlers hiring to build an “AI Staff Engineer” — devs ask: is this my replacement
TLDR: Delty, a YC-backed startup from ex-Google engineers, is hiring to build an “AI Staff Engineer” that learns your company’s code to advise on architecture. Commenters are split between excitement for real context-aware AI and fears of job replacement and code privacy, making this a flashpoint for AI-in-the-workplace debates.
Delty, a fresh Y Combinator startup founded by ex-Google engineers, says it’s hiring people to build the world’s first “AI Staff Engineer” — a smart helper trained on your team’s code and docs to make big-picture tech decisions. Translation for the comments section: is the robot taking the senior engineer job or just the meetings? The pitch: full‑stack work across React, AWS, TypeScript, and lots of AI/ML (that’s artificial intelligence and machine learning). The vibe online: split right down the middle.
One camp is hyped, calling it “Clippy for architecture, but actually good,” arguing that real context beats today’s copy‑paste code bots. The skeptics are louder: “Hire humans to build the bot that replaces them” became the meme of the thread, alongside jokes about 1:1s with your robot manager and it constantly proposing microservices “for synergy.” Privacy hawks fired back too: if the AI is trained on your company’s code, who sees it and where does it live? Meanwhile, startup veterans eye the ex‑Google/YC combo and ask whether this is another shiny wrapper over a large language model (a text‑predicting AI) — or a real system‑level tool.
Between “finally, useful AI” and “vaporware with swagger,” the comment drama raged. One thing’s clear: everyone wants fewer tickets and more architecture magic — as long as it doesn’t cost them their job.
Key Points
- •Delty is hiring full-stack engineers to build an “AI Staff Engineer” product.
- •The product is trained on a team’s codebase, documentation, and system history to provide system-level understanding.
- •Responsibilities include integrating LLMs, processing long-form text, applying ML (e.g., regression), and building data pipelines.
- •Candidates need at least 3 years of full-stack experience with substantial AI/ML work and end-to-end system design skills.
- •Founders are ex-Google engineers with experience at YouTube and Google Pay; the role offers high impact and rapid growth.