About the role
About Scalar : Building on a great API is one of the best feelings in software — every interface you want is right there, and it all just works. Building on a bad one is the opposite: out-of-date docs, no SDK in your language, no MCP server. We started Scalar to fix that. We're a small team (around ten engineers and designers) who wear a lot of hats and obsess over our craft. We think every company deserves Stripe-level docs, SDKs, and MCP servers from day zero — not just the ones with a platform team to build them. Open-source is in our DNA: our whole team contributes to and maintains repositories across the API ecosystem, including the standards everyone relies on, like OpenAPI. We keep things lean and move without layers of process — engineers pick up problems, talk to each other, and ship. We're looking for owners with high agency: people who see what needs doing and do it. If you do your best work with a lot of autonomy and very little ego, you'll feel at home here.
The role You'll own the platform that every other Scalar product runs on — the services, infrastructure, and internal tooling behind Docs, SDKs, the API Client, and Agent Scalar. This is one of the most load-bearing roles on
the team: when you make the platform faster and more reliable, everyone ships faster. Our infrastructure is real software, not config soup. We run a TypeScript monorepo on GCP, and our infrastructure-as-code is Pulumi written in TypeScript — so platform work here is engineering, not just YAML. You'll get deep into the existing system quickly and make it your own.
What you'll work on Docs — the documentation platform: Markdown/MDX, OpenAPI and AsyncAPI references, two-way Git sync, and AI/MCP chat, owned from backend to UI SDK generation — turning a customer's OpenAPI document into type-safe client libraries across TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP, Java, and Ruby, with code samples and automated GitHub sync The API Client — our open-source, offline-first Postman alternative, built on open standards and shipping across macOS, Windows, and Linux Agent Scalar — secure MCP servers and AI features for chatting with APIs, built on the Vercel AI SDK, the MCP SDK, and Vertex AI Our hybrid compute model: Cloud Run for most backend services, plus multi-region Compute Engine managed instance groups for the stateful, high-throughput ones (hosted doc serving, realtime, collaborative editing) Infrastructure-as-code in Pulumi (TypeScript) — provisioning, secrets, networking, and the GCP services underneath everything The eventing and async backbone: Pub/Sub (with dead-letter handling), Cloud Tasks , and Cloud Scheduler Object storage and artifact pipelines on GCS — cached docs builds, publish artifacts, image uploads, and CDN delivery The SDK generation pipeline — the service that turns OpenAPI documents into SDKs and keeps them synced to GitHub Reliability, performance, and autoscaling as usage grows, across both Cloud Run and regional instance groups Internal tooling the whole team depends on: our in-house CLI toolkit, per-service deploy pipelines, GitHub Actions CI, and our DB-backed feature-flag system Observability and operational health — Sentry, structured logging (pino → Better Stack), and the analytics path into BigQuery You might be a fit if You've owned production infrastructure at a startup or small team and liked the breadth of it You're comfortable being the person who understands how things actually work, end to end You can go deep on a TypeScript-heavy stack — and you like that our infra is written in TypeScript too You've run real services on a cloud provider (we're on GCP) and understand the trade-offs between serverless and long-lived VMs You make decisions and communicate them clearly without waiting to be told what to do You'd rather collaborate to the right answer than win the argument, and you operate with a high level of kindness
