Mission
Speakeasy enables innovation for every engineering team.
We are building an expansive, developer-first API Platform that allows developers to launch, monitor and manage the entire API lifecycle in a single place. In doing so, we allow developers to minimize non-core DevOps work, and instead put their focus back on strategic, value-adding projects.
Problem
APIs are exploding in popularity. API-first companies like Stripe or Twilio offer public APIs that enable other developers to access an incredible breadth of functionality with just a few lines of code. Private APIs and microservices enable engineering teams internally to operate effectively as they grow.
But there are a dizzying number of disparate tasks that need to be dealt with to create and maintain these APIs: infrastructure setup and deployment, gateway configuration, test automation, billing, authz/n, usage monitoring, debugging, client SDK, docs generation – and more. (
We’ve written more about the problems with API development here)
Developers, PMs, technical writers and DevOps users end up spending significant time attempting to address all these concerns manually today.
The UX Lead Role
We’re looking for a founding UX Lead to help us build the future of how developers build and ship APIs.
You’ll be a critical part of a small team (currently 4 people). You’ll work closely with our existing design partners to help define near-term product improvements, and help conduct customer discovery to define longer-term roadmap and vision.
Although this is an IC role currently, we hope you can grow the function as the company grows -- and play a pivotal role in shaping our company culture too.
About us
Sagar was previously Director of Engineering at LiveRamp. He was the first engineering hire for the company in London and built both dev tooling and data infrastructure teams, growing the London office to 50+ developers.
Simon was most recently a product lead at Flexport and has over 10 years of product development experience. He was the 2nd hire at SafeGraph where he led development of their flagship product.
Speakeasy is backed by a top-tier VC and an exciting group of angel investors who occupy leadership positions at key software engineering firms.
We’re based in San Francisco, and are looking to hire remote-first in the US. We believe that in-person collaboration is strategically important for a company at our stage, while also recognizing that great talent can be found anywhere. To balance the two, there are no constraints on employee location, but we do plan for our entire team to meet up and spend a week together roughly every 2 months (travel paid for) — we think this is important not only for velocity, but also for company culture.
About you
An ideal candidate:
- Has experience building products from scratch and working in collaborative teams
- Is excited to build products for developers at a critical level of the tech stack; bonus for experience working on developer tools, developer productivity or infrastructure products, though passion for the domain and ability to learn quickly is the only real prerequisite
- Can cut through the noise to quickly understand root "jobs to be done"
- Can think big picture as well as get into the details,
- Gets to the 80/20 answer quickly
- Excited to build a company and team from the ground floor up!
Qualities we value
-Execution: We’ve a fast-moving and exciting environment where you will be putting down foundational building blocks for the company. We execute with a sense of urgency.
-Humility: Our success is always a team activity. We bring small egos to work and support each other in our shared endeavor every day.
-Ownership & Autonomy: We gather data, make clear decisions, and have ownership of our product and our outcomes.
-Transparency: We are honest with others and, most importantly, ourselves. We extend this value to our development as well, which is why we build in the open. Some of what we ship will be open source and wherever possible we have public roadmaps for our customers to engage with.
-Tenacity: Startups require adaptability and perseverance. We value stamina to stay the course. We’re building a company that will shape the ecosystem for the next 10+ years, and we want our teams’ decision making to share that perspective.
