Stainless is building the future of APIs: type-driven, robust, and polished.

Our mission is to bring the best of GraphQL and gRPC to the simplicity and ubiquity of REST.

Our business model is to offer a suite of developer platform products to enable every company to offer the kind of DX Stripe does around their API.

Our first product is API client libraries as a service – you send us your OpenAPI spec, we let your customers npm install your-company (or equivalent, in several languages).

Founded by the creator of Stripe's API client library codegen system, Stainless is backed by Sequoia and the General Partnership, around 2 years old, under 10 people, and has had real revenue from day 1, including from customers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Position overview

Founding engineers are a special breed – they build the core systems that form the foundation of a company for years, both scrappily getting things done wherever help is needed and thinking deeply on foundational architecture.

Joining as a Founding Engineer, you’ll have a focus area, but we’ll all be pitching in on every aspect of the company and acting with a high degree of ownership in a collegial, humble atmosphere.

Principal responsibilities

In the next 6 months, you will:

• Pair with our CEO to prototype, architect, and build an industry-leading open-source TypeScript API Framework (think FastAPI for Node, with the biggest perks of tRPC and GraphQL).
• Collaborate on a frontend client – think Apollo for REST.
• Drive rich tooling – codemods and codegen powered by a mix of static analysis and (perhaps) LLMs, etc.
• Talk with developers at small startups, growth-stage companies, and enterprises to understand their needs.
• Engage with an open-source community on GitHub.
• Write great docs, help build a great website, do what needs done.

Requirements

• Experience level to build anything you can imagine, with great design and sound architecture.
• Built and/or maintained a popular open-source project.
  • Alternatively, maintained internal abstractions used across an engineering org.