Senior Frontend Developer
What we're looking for
- 4+ years of frontend engineering experience
- Portfolio of complex web apps
- US work authorization or O-1 visa eligibility
- Product sense and design intuition
- High autonomy and low ego
Own the frontend of our core product - shipping interfaces that feel instant, intuitive, and polished even when the underlying work is complex. This isn't a role where you wait for designs to land in your queue: you'll make product and design calls yourself, prototype quickly, and execute without perfect specs. Sometimes you'll implement designs; other times you'll create them.
The expectation is craft - not just working code, but software that feels good: loading states, empty states, error messages, keyboard shortcuts, and the thousand small decisions that separate a polished product from a functional one.
About the Company
We're a 12-14 person AI-native team building a personal AI assistant for knowledge workers - something closer to "Cursor for knowledge work" than a chatbot. The system understands user context, curates and prioritises work, operates in the background, and delivers supervision-ready output rather than waiting to be prompted. We've raised $30M in seed funding from Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator - one of the largest seed rounds in YC history. The team is composed of former founders, CTOs, and high-agency builders, where high ownership is the norm, not the exception.
What You'll Bring
4+ years of frontend engineering experience
A portfolio of complex web apps you've shipped - production systems real users depend on, not side projects
Deep React fluency: you understand state management, when to memoize, how callbacks work, and the component lifecycle, and you write clean, reusable components. You spot prop drilling before it becomes a problem and know when to lift into context or a dedicated state store
Full-stack comfort: owning a feature end to end - DB migration, backend route, frontend fetch, and UI - without a separate engineer for each layer
Performance instinct: you know when to cache, when to refetch stale data, and how to optimistically update the UI, and you notice duplicated network requests
Product sense and design intuition: take a rough product direction, sketch an interaction, and ship something that feels right without waiting for a finished spec
High autonomy, low ego: you ship, gather feedback, and iterate, and you unblock yourself
US work authorisation or O-1 eligibility, and based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting (European candidates may be considered for O-1 visa sponsorship)
Bonus Points
Experience with multiplayer apps (Y.js, Automerge, CRDTs)
Building interfaces for LLM-based tools - streaming responses, handling uncertainty, progressive disclosure
Local-first architectures (service workers, sync strategies)
A design background or strong visual sense
Previously a founding frontend engineer who established standards from scratch
Interview Process
Application - resume and a few short questions. Exceptional candidates go from first touch to offer within two weeks.
1-minute Loom - tell us who you are and why this role.
15-minute intro call - align on location, motivation, and logistics.
System design interview - a deep dive into how you think and architect systems, walking through a real product problem together.
Final conversation - your questions answered and the work trial scoped.
Paid work trial - in person, a few days to two weeks, working on a real project to see how we work together.
What's on Offer
Meaningful early-stage equity
Comprehensive health and dental coverage
401(k)
Considerable PTO
Gym budget and daily lunch
Benefits
Equity details
About Wordware
We're a 12-14 person AI-native team in San Francisco building a personal AI assistant for knowledge workers - something closer to "Cursor for knowledge work" than a chatbot. The system understands user context, curates and prioritises work, operates in the background, and delivers supervision-ready output rather than waiting to be prompted. We've raised $30M in seed funding from Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator - one of the largest seed rounds in YC history. The team is composed of former founders, CTOs, and high-agency builders. High ownership is the norm, not the exception.