Founding Engineer

Mission

At Speakeasy we’re building the next generation of API infrastructure. APIs both external and internal are increasingly important but are often artificially restricted in usage and potential revenue, often through poor developer experience. This is especially true of REST APIs which are 80%+ of the ecosystem. Consumers who rely on these critical interfaces are left with little to no last mile tooling meaning their “average time to 200” is measured in days and weeks. Companies like Stripe, Twilio, Plaid, etc. show the power of external APIs and API-first business models. Infrastructure companies like AWS and GCP drive huge increases in developer usage via APIs. They’ve invested in massive internal platform engineering efforts to drive API adoption. Internally, APIs are necessary for any large well-functioning engineering organisation to operate. As organisations get bigger they suffer from all the issues faced by public API users — and more (lack of documentation, lack of maintenance, etc.). There is a huge transformation going on at large organisations, exemplified by Amazon, towards service-oriented organisational structures, with APIs as the service interface between different business functions. Internal service efforts are being powered through new API interfaces like terraform .

Our Product

We have been building out Client SDKs as a Service as our first product along with a suite of tooling for API authentication, telemetry and more. We believe this is just the beginning and are expanding deeper into the stack capturing more of the API value chain as we go. We build our core product with Typescript, Go, React, NextJS, Kubernetes, and Terraform. We support the long-tail of the API ecosystem through code synthesis, thus far generating SDKs for PHP, Java, Ruby, Go, Python and Typescript, along with Terraform Providers from OpenAPI specifications. As a founding team member, you will be deeply involved in our technical evolution and architecture. Here is a sneak peak at the kind of cool tech you’ll have the opportunity to build. We’re looking for polyglots, who can understand and support customers in whatever language and technology they use to build and integrate API products – the more languages, the better. Our engineering team is founded on the principle of context over control. We ship code quickly and continuously to production, and trust each other to exercise autonomy to evolve our product and processes to ever-better match our company goals.

About us

Speakeasy was co-founded by Sagar Batchu and Simon Yu. Sagar was previously Director of Engineering at LiveRamp. He was the first engineering hire for the company in London and built both dev tooling and data infrastructure teams, growing the London office to 50+ developers. He also open-sourced LiveRamp’s API development stack. Simon was most recently a product lead at Flexport and has over 10 years of product development experience. He was 2nd hire at SafeGraph where he led development of their flagship product. We are now a tight knit team of 8 with a strong sense of ownership and purpose. Speakeasy is a seed stage startup backed by top-tier VCs and a bench of angel investors who occupy leadership positions at key software engineering firms. We’re based in San Francisco and London, and are looking to hire remote-first in the US or UK with a preference for PST and GMT time zones. We believe that in-person collaboration is strategically important for a company at our stage, while also recognising that amazing team members can be found anywhere. To balance the two, there are no constraints on employee location, but we do meet up and spend a week together roughly every quarter.

Our Company Values:

Autonomy over ConsensusWe trust individuals to make decisions, own the outcomes, and gather data from others where appropriate.
Execution over PerfectionWe prioritise and execute. We don’t analyse, and are comfortable moving ahead despite ambiguity
Transparency over IllusionWe are ambitious in our goals, but honest about our progress. We don’t shy away from asking questions or pushing back when something doesn’t make sense.
Through customer value our ego is lostWe make decisions by focusing relentlessly on customer value — and accept if this means changing our individual ideas. Customer success is team success.

About you
Enthusiastic about working on technical challenges for developer focused products and not hesitant to dive into the rabbit hole and become operational with a new piece of tech. Comfortable working in a fast-paced and ambiguous environment aka shifting sands of startup land. You love diving deep into the comments section of a design doc :) but also bias towards action and spin out that POC before lunchtime. Excited to be a builder for builders! Empathy for developers across the stack and an enthusiasm for developer first productsA great product sense and experience building infrastructure products that other team’s rely onEnjoy understanding technical domains deeply and are willing to really get into the weeds. A high sense of technical ownership and desire to please the customer.

You might be a good fit if you:

Have experience working on internal platform engineering teams, developer tools, developer productivity or infrastructure products at scale. Have experienced the realities of building and maintaining APIs first hand. Are a generalist and polyglot engineer with an ability to pick up new frameworks quickly and willing to work across the stack from backend to frontend. Looking to write foundational lines of code that will become core product for years to come

Bonus: Experience with code generation, transpilation, synthesis, building or extending core web frameworks like Axios, tPRC, Mux etc.

Bonus: Expertise with OpenAPI, building SDKs or other tooling for REST APIs
Bonus: Expertise using LLMs for code generation or code completion.

Let's chat!

Email us at [email protected]