Senior Platform Engineer

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 Building on a bad one is the opposite: out-of-date docs, no SDK in your language, no MCP server.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

Nice to have

• Depth in GCP specifically - Cloud Run, Compute Engine, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL, GCS, Secret Manager, Artifact Registry

• Experience with Pulumi (or IaC in a real programming language rather than HCL)

• Multi-region deployment, autoscaling, and rolling-update experience

• A track record of building internal developer tooling that makes a team faster

• Comfort across polyglot persistence - we run MongoDB as our primary store alongside purpose-specific PostgreSQL databases (including pgvector)

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

• A background in developer tools or APIs, and familiarity with OpenAPI

Where we work

Remote. Most of the team overlaps with US time zones (PT-ET), and we prefer candidates in the US or Western Canada for that overlap. If you're a strong fit in a European time zone and can make the overlap work, apply anyway and say so.

We're fully remote and 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 will involve a significant portion of backend service management, the candidate will also be expected to contribute to the frontend and may be asked to lead the development of new features in either space.

• We are a small team of 10 developers and wear many hats. We expect everyone to pitch in and help out where needed.

• We are open to both fixed-term contract and full-time permanent positions. Compensation Range: $150-250k (CAD)/$105-180 (USD) based on experience