Getting Started with Remote

The Remote API gives you programmatic access to everything available in the Remote product—hiring, payroll, time off, expenses, and more—so you can build on top of it, integrate it with your own systems, or embed it directly into your product.

Find Your Path

What are you trying to do? Select the path that matches your immediate goal:

Connect Remote to my internal systems (HRIS, finance tools, data warehouse)
➔ Go to the Integration Guide for Customers
Offer Remote's employment and payroll capabilities inside my own product
➔ Go to the Partner / Embedded Guide
Build a lightweight internal tool or custom workflow on top of Remote
➔ Go to the API Quick Start

Looking for something specific?

Building with an AI assistant or LLM? ➔ Remote MCP Guide
Want expert help building your integration? ➔ Remote Build (Our paid professional services tier for complex enterprise architectures) COMING SOON

What You Can Build

Remote is an open infrastructure platform. Because your data isn't trapped behind a closed interface, you can build customized experiences across three main pillars:

Connect Remote to your stack:
- Sync employee and employment lifecycle data into your HRIS, data warehouse, or finance tooling
- Keep systems aligned on hiring, changes, approvals, and payroll-relevant attributes
- Reduce manual handoffs and rekeying across tools
Automate workflows:

Remote isn’t a closed system that forces every workflow through one interface. If your business needs a custom workflow, you can build it:
- Approvals routing
- Payroll-adjacent operational tasks
- Admin guardrails that match your org structure
Build "Headless" experiences:

If you want the Remote foundation, but not the default UI as the primary surface, you can build headless experiences that:
- Fit your internal tools and processes
- Provide opinionated UX for your admins/managers/employees
- Still rely on Remote’s infrastructure for correctness and compliance

Prerequisite

Before you start, you need a safe environment to test your requests.

You must have Sandbox Credentials to authenticate against our staging environment. If you don't have a developer sandbox account yet, sign up here.

Quick Start: Your First API Call

Establish your connection and see the API in action by making your first authenticated request to fetch your sandbox company metadata.

1. Set Up Your Authentication

Retrieve your API Token from your Sandbox Dashboard. For testing, pass this token in the header of your request as a Bearer token.

2. Make the Call

Copy and run the snippet below in your terminal (replacing YOUR_SANDBOX_TOKEN with your actual token):

curl --request GET \
     --url [https://gateway.remote.com/api/v1/company](https://gateway.remote.com/api/v1/company) \
     --header 'accept: application/json' \
     --header 'authorization: Bearer YOUR_SANDBOX_TOKEN'

3. Verify the Response

A successful connection will return a 200 OK status and a JSON body containing your company's unique tracking identifier and regional settings:

{
  "data": {
    "company": {
      "id": "9a3b2c1d-4e5f-6a7b-8c9d-0e1f2a3b4c5d",
      "name": "Acme Sandbox Corp",
      "country_code": "USA",
      "status": "active"
    }
  }
}

4. Receive Real-Time Events

If your application depends on event-driven changes, such as onboarding lifecycle status updates or time-off approvals, then you can skip manual database polling entirely by setting up webhooks. ➔ Subscribe to your first Webhook

Explore our official GitHub repositories for template architectures, boilerplate authorization loops, and sample apps you can clone or fork.