Fern
Input OpenAPI. Output SDKs and API documentation.
Deployed Engineer
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.
Sound like you? Get in touch.
What you’ll do
- Have direct relationships with customers. Whether they’re a CTO, VP of Eng, or Software Engineer, you’ll be the face of Fern and the first person they turn to when they need help. You’ll quickly build a network within the SaaS startup community, especially among YC founders.
- Move fast. To support our customers, you’ll work across several codebases to release bug fixes and features. For example, one day you may fix a bug related to our TypeScript SDK generator and another day you may add features to the Docs Frontend.
- Drive our product roadmap. When you hear a request from a customer that feels hard to build, they may be questioning an assumption we made 6 months ago or proposing a feature requiring a large engineering effort from us. You can use this customer context to build something people want.™
- Build our team. We’re growing, and you will work directly with the CEO, CTO, and other founding members to bring in talented engineers.
What you’ll bring
- 3+ years of professional software development, ideally some of which you’ve spent as a solutions engineer, forward deployed engineer, or founder
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with an ability to think on your feet and solve problems during calls with technical customers
- Significant experience with TypeScript and at least one other programming language
- Willingness to be a polyglot and work across multiple programming languages (e.g., TypeScript, Python, Rust)
- (Bonus) Experience working with the OpenAPI specification, Conjure (Palantir), or Smithy (AWS)
What we offer
- An opportunity to build a network with high-growth software companies
- 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
- Unlimited vacation
Our tech stack
- Next.js + Vercel (Frontend)
- Claude + Bedrock (LLM)
- Fern (API)
- Microservices: Express (Node.js), FastAPI (Python)
- Algolia + turbopuffer (Search)
- Postgres DB + Prisma ORM (Database)
- AWS (Cloud)
About the interview
- Phone Screen with a founder
- Technical Interview: Coding
- Technical Interview: Decomp (System Design)
- Work Trial (in office)
- Offer!
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 10 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.
