Customer Engineer

About Stainless

Stainless is a fast-growing tech startup building the future of APIs. Our customers include industry leaders like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cloudflare.

We are currently 15-20 people based primarily in NYC (just west of SoHo) and looking to grow to ~70 in NYC over the next 3 years. We were founded in 2022 and are backed by top investors including Sequoia.

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 developer experience 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).

Our founder, Alex Rattray, created Stripe's API client library codegen system and led a redesign of the Stripe API docs.

Position overview

Customer Engineers are the direct interface between Stainless and our users. You’ll work with all Stainless users from those just starting on their integrations, to those that have been with us for years (like OpenAI, Anthropic). You’ll be the voice of the customer to the rest of the company, advocating for them and directly influencing the roadmap of the company both immediately and longer term.

This is a role beyond what many might consider to be true Support Engineering. To excel in this role you will have strong independent judgement and can write software in a wide variety of programming languages (maybe from prior experience or picked up on the job). You learn quickly and can jump into unfamiliar contexts (and repositories) with ease.

We’re growing the team from 2 to 4 (and beyond) and you’ll be laying down the foundation of how we support our customers now and in the years to come.

Responsibilities

This team has a broad purview; each member tends to self-select into the areas that fit them best, and may conduct “tours of duty” as the needs of the business grow and change.

For example, you might “pick 3 of 5” responsibilities to share with another teammate from the below (nonexclusive!) list:

1. Support Engineering: slack, email, github issues, etc.

2. Sales Engineering: work with new prospects to pitch and demo Stainless

3. Solutions Engineering: from small (e.g., webhook verification for Mux) to major projects (e.g., streaming helpers for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc)

4. Technical Writing (Docs): Specific technical documentation on pagination, OAuth, HTTP authentication, etc. Narrative guides on how to get started on Stainless

5. Developer Relations & Marketing: HN-worthy blog posts, twitter, events, videos and beyond

6. Product Engineering (small fixes/improvements to our web app or codegen)

7. Internal Tooling (developer tooling & Retool)

Overall you’ll:

• Support developers at small startups, growth-stage companies, and enterprises to understand their needs:

  • Improving and refining code they’ve written

  • Explaining the intricacies and capabilities of Stainless

  • Handle inbound and outbound requests across Slack, email and beyond

  • Make sure any issues, requests or rough edges are used to shape product work at Stainless

• Write great docs, help build a great website, do what needs done.

• Write code both internally and for external customers. Some examples:

  • improving our Codegen to handle new use-cases

  • writing examples and demos for potential users

  • writing custom helpers for sophisticated users. Some examples:

    • webhook verification across 5 languages

    • SSE parsing for LLMs

• Location:

  • Either:

    • 3+ days p/wk in our physical office location in Manhattan, New York.

    • PST Remote
      

Profile

You might be a good fit for this role if:

• You have broad polyglot interest/experience – comfort working across multiple programming languages, and enthusiasm to build proficiency with even more.

• You have a true passion for developer experience and empathy for developers from all backgrounds (junior, non-traditional, expert power-user etc).

• You love connecting with new users: learning their needs and coming up with creative solutions to solve them

• You care deeply about great communication about technical subjects, from terseness of a tweet to an expanded tutorial in documentation.

• You’re a quick learner, self-motivated, and able to execute quickly whilst maintaining high quality.

• You love crafting a great product. You appreciate and show extreme detail-orientation in articulating papercuts and finding every possible corner of polish.

• Experience building and consuming APIs

• Built and/or maintained a popular open-source project.

Benefits

• We’ll be competitive with early stage companies on cash and provide generous equity grants.

• Great healthcare coverage options.

• Paid commuter benefits.

• Paid team lunch during workdays.

• Flexible PTO.