Founding Solutions Engineer

About Scalar

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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 Building on a bad one is the opposite: out-of-date docs, no SDK in your language, no MCP server.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

Right now, sales at Scalar is Marc, our CEO, doing every part of it himself. Sourcing the account, running the first call, going deep on the technical evaluation, answering the security review, negotiating the contract, onboarding the team, and picking up the Slack message when something breaks at 5pm. That's founder-led sales end to end, and it's worked — it's how we got Zoom, Clerk, Warp, and Profound.

It also doesn't scale, which is why this role exists.

You'll be our first Solutions Engineer and one of the first three people on the sales team, joining alongside two SDRs starting at the same time. You'll sit next to Marc in our San Francisco office, learn the motion from the person who built it, and then take the technical half of it off his plate — the demos, the proofs of concept, the migrations, and the first ninety days of every customer who signs.

There is a motion here and it works — but it's Marc's, it lives largely in his head, and it has never had a technical counterpart. The demo environments, the POC scoping, the technical qualification bar, the answers to the objection you'll hear for the fourth time: none of that exists yet. You'll build it, and what you build is what the next five people on this team will use. If you've been waiting for the job where you shape how a company sells rather than execute how it already does, this is that job.

Who we sell to

Our buyers are engineers, and the product is the proof. Zoom's developer documentation runs on Scalar. So does Clerk's — a company whose docs were already a competitive advantage, which makes them exactly the kind of customer with no reason to switch unless the thing is genuinely better. Warp and Profound ship SDKs we generate from their OpenAPI documents, in every language their users ask for.

Those are the rooms you'll be in: platform teams, API teams, and the staff engineer who has strong opinions about their spec and is not going to be charmed. They don't want a deck. They want to see their own API rendered in Scalar Docs, their SDK generated in their language, and MCP servers available so agents can do real work against their API. Your job is to make that happen fast enough that the decision makes itself.

This is a genuinely technical job, not a sales job with a technical veneer. You'll be writing TypeScript against a prospect's OpenAPI document live on a call, and opening a PR against scalar/scalar the next morning to fix whatever made it hard. The same product surface our platform team runs — Docs, SDK generation, and Agent Scalar — is the surface you'll demo, migrate customers onto, and file reproductions against.

What you'll work on

Technical wins

— live demos and hands-on POCs against a prospect's real API, not a sandbox. Scoping calls, architecture questions, and the security and compliance reviews nobody else wants to answer

Docs migrations

— getting teams off Redocly, Mintlify, Stoplight, ReadMe, and homegrown docs sites, including the unglamorous part: cleaning up OpenAPI documents that have drifted from reality for three years, and rebuilding their Markdown/MDX and two-way Git sync so nothing breaks in the cut-over

SDK generation

— showing an engineering team what their spec produces across TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP, Java, and Ruby, explaining why a oneOf or a missing discriminator makes their SDK ugly, and fixing the spec so it doesn't

Agent Scalar

— standing up secure MCP servers against a prospect's API and demonstrating what an agent can do with a well-described interface, which is still a new enough argument that you'll be making it for the first time in most rooms

Building the motion with Marc

— turning founder-led selling into something repeatable: qualification criteria, demo environments, POC scoping that doesn't take three weeks, and the answers to the objections we hear more than twice

Building, actually building

— sample apps, custom themes, integration glue, reproduction cases, and fixes to our own repos. You'll open PRs against Scalar, not just tickets

Onboarding and support

— owning the first 90 days of a new customer, and being the technical escalation when an SDK generates something wrong or a CI sync breaks at 5pm

Product feedback with evidence

— you'll see every gap before anyone else does. We expect you to say so loudly, with a reproduction, and sometimes with a patch

The function after you

— as we grow the team, you'll set the technical bar for who joins it and train the people who follow you into this role

You might be a fit if

You've done customer-facing technical work — solutions or sales engineering, forward-deployed, developer relations, or consulting — and you can hold your own with a skeptical staff engineer

You actually write code. TypeScript is our stack; you should be comfortable enough to build a working integration live on a call without rehearsing it first

You know APIs deeply — OpenAPI, JSON Schema, auth flows, SDK ergonomics, and what separates a reference doc that works from one that just exists

A function that currently exists only in the founder's head reads as the reason to take the job rather than the reason to pass

You can take a deal from first technical call to signed to successfully onboarded without being handed a process for it

You'd rather be honest about a limitation and win the next deal than talk around it

You'd rather collaborate to the right answer than win the argument, and you operate with a high level of kindness

Nice to have

Experience at a developer-tools or API company, especially selling to engineering teams

Hands-on with MCP, agents, or LLM-powered developer tooling — we're building on the MCP SDK, the Vercel AI SDK, and Vertex AI

Vue 3, or comfort ramping into it quickly

You've been the first or second GTM technical hire somewhere and know what that actually costs

Experience running technical evaluations against enterprise requirements — self-hosting, SSO/SAML, air-gapped deployments, procurement security reviews

An in-house-first instinct — we build our own clients and tooling and work hard to reduce external dependencies

Open-source contributions we can go read

Where we work

In-office in San Francisco.

Scalar is otherwise a remote team, and our engineering roles are remote — but we're building the sales team in person on purpose. You'll be in a room with Marc and two SDRs, every day, in the year where we scale the sales organization.

That's the real offer here. Founder-led sales is learned by sitting next to the founder while he does it — hearing the call that goes sideways, watching which technical objection actually kills a deal, arguing about the pricing conversation on the walk back. None of that survives being written down or watched later in a recording. Expect meaningful in-person time with customers and prospects around the Bay Area too.

We offer flexible, unlimited time off. We believe prioritizing the team's well-being makes the work better and more meaningful.

Other notes

While the role is customer-facing, you'll be in the codebase regularly and may be asked to own a feature end to end where it unblocks a customer.

We are a small team of ten and wear many hats. We expect everyone to pitch in and help out where needed.

This role has a variable component tied to team and company targets, not an individual quota — you should be optimizing for customers succeeding, not for closing something that shouldn't close.

Compensation Range:

$145,000–$185,000 (USD) base plus variable, for an on-target range of $170,000–$215,000, based on experience — plus meaningful early equity.