From MVP to an Award-Winning Signature Platform

In 2023, electronic signature tools like DocuSign and Adobe were hard for developers to use. They were built for salespeople, not programmers. If you wanted to add signatures to your app, you had to deal with complicated documentation, confusing SDKs, and high prices.

I joined SignatureAPI as the first engineer to change that. The product was an MVP. My job was to turn it into a platform developers would actually want to use.

Today the platform processes thousands of envelopes per day, over 100,000 envelopes per year, and hundreds of thousands of signed documents. In 2024 it won Best API Debut at the API World Awards, alongside winners like Postman and Stack Overflow.

Building the Playground

We launched our beta in March 2024. Developers signed up but many left without trying the API.

I looked at the data and watched how people used the site. The problem was that developers had trouble making their first API call. They would read the docs but get stuck before actually testing anything.

I spent two weeks building an Interactive API Playground. It lets developers test the API without writing any code first. They can create a document, add signers, and send a test signature request just by clicking buttons.

This helped a lot. More developers started using our API because they could see it work right away. This taught me that good documentation isn’t just text. It’s better when people can try things out interactively.

Making It Work for Non-Developers

As we grew, I noticed something. Developers loved our API, but non-technical people at companies wanted a simpler way to use it. They wanted to send contracts from spreadsheets without writing code.

I built a Power Automate Connector for Microsoft. Now, someone in HR could set up a simple workflow like “when I add a new person to this Excel spreadsheet, automatically send them an NDA.”

This let non-technical teams automate their work without needing to ask developers for help.

An Architecture That Doesn’t Go Down

Legal documents can’t wait for a server restart. We committed to less than 10 minutes of downtime per year. We have delivered zero downtime for multiple years.

The platform runs as five services: the core API, the signing ceremony, a cryptography service, a rendering service, and an integrations layer. Each one deploys and scales on its own using Docker and ECS. Heavy work like document rendering, email delivery, and webhook dispatch runs through queues with idempotent retries, sustaining thousands of concurrent operations.

I also rebuilt our CI/CD from scratch. Every merge now ships to production automatically in about 5 minutes: parallel staging deploys, end-to-end tests split into balanced shards, and live preview environments. Nobody pushes a button. Nothing goes down.

Performance gets the same treatment. When our worst dashboard queries passed 30 seconds, I moved the aggregations into PostgreSQL and added the right indexes. The same queries now return in under a second.

Earning Trust: SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR

Companies trust us with contracts, NDAs, and medical documents. That trust has to be earned with evidence, not promises.

I co-designed our compliance strategy, then led the implementation: security controls, organizational changes, and enforcement across engineering. We achieved SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance. I also led our GDPR readiness, from the gap assessment to account anonymization and cascading data erasure.

Behind the certifications sits a continuous hardening program: least-privilege IAM audits, strict HTTP security headers, cryptographically secure signing URLs, OTP lockouts, webhook signature verification, and over 156 patched dependency vulnerabilities.

This work isn’t as visible as new features. It’s what makes customers trust us with their most important documents.

Teaching AI Agents to Sign Documents

Electronic signatures are an old market. AI agents are not, and they need to sign documents too.

I designed and shipped SignatureAPI’s hosted MCP server so AI assistants can create and send envelopes directly. It handles OAuth and API key authentication, per-account gating, and file uploads through CloudFront and Lambda@Edge. Our ChatGPT app is under directory review, and you can already connect it manually.

I also made signing ceremonies agent-aware, and shipped an AI support agent that resolves customer tickets using our own documentation as its knowledge base.

Beyond the Code

Being the first engineer means doing more than engineering.

I presented the technical side of the product to Platanus during the accelerator’s enrollment and through the pre-seed investment that followed. I join integration calls with our largest enterprise customers. I built a customer health dashboard that flags at-risk accounts: about 70% of the customers we reached out to stayed with us, and nearly half became more active than before. I also mentored our junior engineer, who now works as a Product Manager.

Where We Are Today

SignatureAPI handles rental agreements, freelance contracts, and company approvals for paying customers every day. New developers find us every week.

We’re making it easy for developers, and now AI agents, to add legally binding signatures to their apps. As simple as sending an email.