Kayla Lee

Kayla Lee
Occupation	Entrepreneur, software engineer
Known for	Co-founder of Outship

Kayla Lee is an American entrepreneur and co-founder of Outship, a recruiting technology company that enables employers to evaluate software engineering candidates by observing how they use artificial intelligence tools during coding tasks. Outship was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2025 batch.

Career

Lee co-founded Outship alongside Saner Cakir. The company is based in San Francisco and operates in the artificial intelligence, B2B, and recruiting sectors.

Outship was developed in response to changes in software engineering workflows brought about by AI-assisted coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor. The company's premise is that as AI tools become standard in software development, the ability to evaluate engineers based solely on the final code they produce is insufficient. Instead, Outship's platform is designed to capture and analyze the entire process by which a candidate works — including how they decompose problems, direct AI agents, make architectural tradeoffs, and recover from errors.

The platform provides candidates with a cloud-based workspace that is pre-configured and ready for coding. Outship handles environment setup and secret management so that all candidates work on a level testing ground. Employers can then review both the process and the resulting code to make more informed hiring decisions.

Outship's approach reflects a broader shift in technical recruiting, where the integration of AI tools into everyday engineering work has prompted companies to reconsider how they assess technical talent. Rather than traditional whiteboard interviews or take-home coding challenges evaluated on output alone, Outship positions the candidate's workflow and decision-making process as the primary hiring signal.

The company launched as part of the Y Combinator Winter 2025 cohort and was included in the batch's public launch day lineup.