About this role
About Fern:
At Fern, we believe every software company should offer a world-class API. We're building the toolkit to make that possible. We enable customers like Square, ElevenLabs, and Auth0 to offer a best-in-class developer (DX) and agent experiences (AX).
Our team is primarily ex-Palantir and ex-founders, working together from our office in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We give builders the autonomy to take ownership, the speed to move quickly, and the support to do the best work of their careers.
Why you should work here:
Experience a hyper-growth startup: Join a top-decile growth company early. You'll get firsthand exposure to how a startup scales with visibility into product, engineering, design, and go-to-market. Thinking of founding a startup someday? This is the place to learn.
High trust and autonomy: You’ll have ownership over meaningful projects from day one, with the freedom to shape technical decisions and influence product direction. We trust engineers to figure out the best path forward—without micromanagement.
We move quick: Your code will ship quickly and be used by our customers within days (and sometimes hours). We prioritize shipping fast, and invest in the developer experience toolchain to make that possible.
Few meetings and bureaucracy: No bloated sprint rituals or unnecessary status updates. Just clear priorities, thoughtful async communication, and space to build.
What you’ll do:
As a Software Engineering Manager at Fern, you’ll lead a small, high-leverage team of engineers building core product experiences used by thousands of developers. You’ll balance hands-on technical leadership with people leadership to own execution, quality, and team health while staying close to the code and customers.
Lead and grow a high-performing team: Manage, mentor, and develop a team of engineers as we scale. You’ll set clear expectations, give technical feedback, and help double the team this year by recruiting and interviewing engineer.
Be a technical leader, not just a people manager: This is a true player/coach role. You’ll review code, influence architecture, and help make sound technical decisions across the stack. You’ll write code alongside the team—digging in where problems are hardest, stakes are highest, or customer impact is greatest.
Build developer-facing web infrastructure: Fern is open source, and you can explore the repo we work in. You’ll lead work on a TypeScript-heavy Next.js application hosted on Vercel, thinking deeply about performance, scalability, reliability, and developer experience across the Fern Docs product.
Improve systems, not just outcomes: Identify where process, tooling, or architecture is slowing us down and fix it. This could mean improving CI, clarifying ownership, simplifying abstractions, or investing in reliability and observability.
What we’re looking for:
8+ years as a software engineer
3+ years as a software engineering manager
Strong written and verbal communication skills to solve technical problems with customers
Experience partnering with product designers
Experience building with TypeScript, Next.js, and Vercel
Benefits:
Prime office location in the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Free meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner)
Health, dental, and vision insurance
Unlimited vacation
Flexible WFH policy
Domestic and international team offsites
About the interview:
Phone screen with a Fern engineer
Two interviews: one coding and one system design
Come onsite to meet and work with our team
Offer!
Other facts
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 Bessemer and YC. We work together in our office in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. Our customers include Square, Auth0, Intuit, Cohere, ElevenLabs, and Webflow.
Input OpenAPI. Output idiomatic SDKs and beautiful API docs. Backed by YCombinator.
Join the team
Active Founders
Hey- I'm a co-founder and CEO at Fern. In my previous role at AWS, I saw how code generation for APIs saved engineering time and offered a best-in-class developer experience. I'm a people person who is happiest at work when collaborating in person or when hearing customer love first-hand.
Deep is a YAML engineer at Fern. Before Fern, he worked as a software engineer at Palantir focusing on data integration at the Department of Defense and US Army.
What you'll do
- Lead and grow a high-performing team of engineers while balancing hands-on technical leadership with people leadership. Build developer-facing web infrastructure and improve systems to enhance performance and reliability.
Ready to join Fern?
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