Senior Frontend Engineer

Wordware • San Francisco, CA

56d • Onsite

About The Position

You'll own the frontend of Sauna — shipping interfaces that feel instant, intuitive, and polished even when the underlying work is complex. You'll need to make product and design calls yourself, prototype quickly, and execute without waiting for perfect specs. Sometimes you'll implement designs. Other times you'll create them.

Requirements

• 4+ years of frontend engineering with a portfolio that'll make the founders stop scrolling. We want to see complex, polished interfaces you've shipped.
• Expert in TypeScript and React — you understand reconciliation, when to bail out of renders, and how the browser actually works.
• Product sense and design intuition — you can take a rough product direction, sketch an interaction, and ship something that feels right. You notice when a transition is 50ms too slow or when an affordance is unclear.
• You make design decisions — You'll need to own some UX decisions, create simple designs when needed, and unblock yourself.
• High autonomy, low ego — you don't wait for permission or perfect specs. You ship, gather feedback, and iterate.
• You care about craft — details like loading states, empty states, error messages, keyboard shortcuts. The 1000 small decisions that make software feel good.

Nice To Haves

• Built with Y.js, Automerge, or CRDTs for real-time collaboration.
• Experience with rich text editors (ProseMirror, TipTap, Slate).
• Built interfaces for LLM-based tools (streaming responses, handling uncertainty, progressive disclosure).
• Experience with local-first architectures (IndexedDB, service workers, sync strategies).
• Design background or strong visual sense — you can make things look good without a designer.
• Been a founding frontend engineer and established standards from scratch.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees