Engineering Manager, SDKs

Department: Engineering

Location: New York City

Compensation: $300K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Fern

Fern helps software companies build a world-class API experience. Our customers include industry leaders like Nvidia, Square, and Twilio, as well as fast-growing AI companies like ElevenLabs and OpenRouter.

In the next year, the majority of API integrations will be implemented by AI agents. Agents don’t read marketing pages. They need strongly typed schemas, structured endpoints, deterministic contracts, and documentation that can be fed into a context window.

Our team is small and talent-dense. We’re a team of builders from Google, Palantir, Amazon, and Uber, working together in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We were acquired by Postman — giving us access to 40 million users and 98% of the Fortune 500 — while maintaining the independence, speed, and ownership of a startup.

About the Role

As a Software Engineering Manager, SDKs at Fern, you’ll lead a high-leverage team of engineers building out Fern’s compiler and code generation infrastructure. You’ll balance hands-on technical leadership with people leadership to own execution, quality, and team health while staying close to the code and customers (see SDKs in production).

You’ll be an engineering leader responsible for managing 6-12 engineers. This role reports to the VP of Engineering and is onsite at our office in Brooklyn.

• Lead and grow a high-performing team: Manage, mentor, and develop a team of high-slope engineers as we scale. You’ll set clear expectations, give technical feedback, and collaborate with Staff Engineers to set technical direction.

• Build AI-native platform capabilities: Build an a user-facing SDK engineer agent that propagates custom code additions across every supported language to ensure cross-language consistency at the scale of customers like Square, Auth0, and Twilio.

• Be a technical leader, not just a people manager: This is a true player/coach role. You’ll review code, influence architecture, and help make sound technical decisions across the stack. You’ll write code alongside the team — digging in where problems are hardest, stakes are highest, or customer impact is greatest.

• Own Fern's compiler: Lead the team building Fern's open source SDK generator — a multi-target code generation system that turns API definitions into idiomatic, strongly typed SDKs across languages like TypeScript, Python, Java, Go, C#, Rust, PHP, Swift, and Ruby.

• Scale our code generation platform: Support thousands of APIs (OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, Protobuf), optimize our remote code generation server’s performance, and ensure generated SDKs remain backwards compatible as upstream APIs evolve.

What We’re Looking For

• 2+ years of leadership experience as a tech lead, engineering manager, or tech lead manager (TLM).

• We’re building open source and we care deeply about taste — we’re looking for builders that know developer experience is a craft.

• You’re hands-on, obsess over the details, and can dive into your code editor when they need help.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills to solve technical problems with customers.

• Bonus: You're a polyglot who has built compilers, designed DSLs, implemented RPC frameworks, or contributed to sandboxed code execution systems.

Benefits

• Prime office location in the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn

• Paid lunch/meals at the office

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• Unlimited vacation