Software Engineer (Backend)

About Fern

APIs underpin the internet but are still painful to work with. They are often untyped, unstandardized, and out-of-sync across multiple sources of truth. Fern enables businesses to offer “Stripe-level” SDKs (client libraries) and Docs for their REST API. Inspired by internal tooling we saw at AWS and Palantir, we’re building Fern to let every engineering team offer easy-to-use and well-documented APIs. Founded in 2022, we’re less than 20 people, building open source, and backed by YCombinator. We work together in our office in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. Our customers include Cohere, ElevenLabs, Webflow, and Merge.dev.

About the role

This role is ideal for ambitious engineers with entrepreneurial goals. Many of us are former or future founders, and this is an opportunity to scale a company from $1M to $10M ARR while partnering with fast-growing tech companies shaping the future of software. We value in-person collaboration and work out of our office in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.

What you’ll do

• Drive feature parity between languages. For each SDK language our generator supports, we need to support 15 features like auto-pagination and server-sent events. We’re constantly raising the bar to make our SDKs the best in the industry. By collaborating closely with our users - often through GitHub Issues—we’re crafting tools developers rely on to build the future.
• Expand SDK language selection. Our customers are asking us to support a broader range of SDK programming languages, such as Swift, Rust, and Terraform providers. Once you get a grasp of our open source compiler, you could author the next generator.
• Be a polyglot. Contribute code across repositories in different programming languages. You may write code in TypeScript, Python, and Go within the same week.
• Build our team. We’re growing, and you will work directly with the CEO and CTO to bring in talented engineers.

What you’ll bring

• 4 years of professional backend or full-stack development
• Significant experience working with TypeScript and one other programming language
• An eye for crafting a great developer experience
• (Bonus) You've worked in a high-growth SaaS company
• (Bonus) Experience working with the OpenAPI specification, Conjure (Palantir), or Smithy (AWS)

What we offer

• Engineering challenges that will push you to become a better developer
• Kind teammates who work hard
• First-hand experience building an early-stage startup
• A salary of $170,000 to $210,000 and equity
• Living proximity bonus of $18,000 per year if you choose to live near the office
• Meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) at the office
• Health, dental, and vision insurance

Our tech stack

• Next.js Vercel (Frontend)
• Fern (API)
• Anthropic Bedrock (LLM)
• Microservices: Express (Node.js), FastAPI (Python)
• Postgres Prisma ORM (Database)
• Algolia turbopuffer (Search)
• AWS (Cloud)

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire. We work with companies funded by the best investors including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, Tiger Global Management, A16Z, Accel, DFJ, and more.