Meet Alejandro Mercado, Founding Software Engineer
One of the two engineers who built the thing partners actually integrate with, and the person most likely to ask whether we need this at all.
Alejandro builds the part of Slate that other engineers meet: the API, the components, and the flows a customer walks through without knowing our name is on any of it.
That is a specific kind of work. Nobody praises an integration that went smoothly, so the only real feedback is silence, and the job is to keep earning it. A partner should read our docs on a Tuesday, ship on a Thursday, and never think about us again.
What he works on
Contracts and the endpoints behind them, the drop-in components, and a lot of the unglamorous machinery around them: retries, edge cases, the things that only appear when real money moves and a bank has an opinion about it.
He also has the most useful habit on the team, which is asking whether a thing needs to exist before building it well. A surprising amount of our roadmap has been improved by him quietly pointing out that the best version of a feature is the one we do not ship.
The rule he holds us to
If a partner has to read a paragraph to understand a field, the field is wrong. We have rewritten more than one API because of that sentence.
