Senior Software Engineer (San Francisco)

This range is provided by Thyme. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$150,000.00/yr - $200,000.00/yr

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Founding Front End Engineer | Stealth AI Creator Startup

About the Company

A breakout consumer AI startup is looking for a Founding Front End Engineer to join at a pivotal moment just after hitting $1M ARR in under 4 months and on track to 10x that within the year.

Theyre building AI tools that supercharge individual creators helping them produce standout social content at scale.

The product sits at the intersection of AI, video, and real-time collaboration . Early traction has been explosive, and theyre backed by top-tier angels with ongoing conversations with tier-1 VCs.

This is an opportunity to own the technical vision , assist in building out the team, and help define a product that could touch millions!

What Youll Do

• Take ownership of foundational frontend architecture as a founding engineer , making decisions that shape the companys core product and design system
• Design and implement complex animation systems using finite state machines
• Manage intricate UI state transitions across multi-step AI-driven workflows
• Build scalable, performant UIs that handle real-time AI streaming, complex data, and progressive loading states
• Maintain high standards for accessibility, quality, and resilience while scaling to thousands of users

Your Skills Must-Have

• 6+ years of production experience building complex, user-facing applications
• State management mastery : expert with FSMs (e.g., XState, Zustand ) and complex UI transitions
• Animation architecture : deep understanding of FLIP technique , hardware acceleration, and custom choreography
• TypeScript expertise : advanced patterns, generics, conditional types, type-safe API design
• Performance engineering : Core Web Vitals, memory profiling, virtual scrolling , render performance tuning
• Accessibility at scale : WCAG 2.1 AA, screen readers , keyboard navigation for complex flows
• Testing excellence : strong experience with visual regression, accessibility, and performance testing

Your Skills Nice-to-Have

• Experience in GPU-based rendering or familiarity with infra considerations for AI-driven UIs
• Building scalable component libraries, design systems , and compound components
• Advanced animation via Framer Motion , React Spring, or custom engines
• Complex data visualization: D3.js, Canvas/WebGL
• Advanced build tooling: Webpack, Vite, code splitting strategies
• Interfaces for ML/AI systems , especially handling non-deterministic or streaming UX
• Familiarity with AI/ML concepts and how to surface them in an intuitive UI

The Stack

• Frontend : TypeScript, React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion, XState
• Testing : Jest, Testing Library, Playwright, Chromatic
• AI Integration : Streaming APIs, WebSocket-based real-time collaboration
• Infrastructure : Docker, CDN optimization, edge computing , GPU-accelerated rendering concepts
• A complex animation system youve architected from scratch
• A performance optimization that improved Core Web Vitals by 20%+
• Examples of accessible, interactive, complex UIs youve built
• (Optional) Open source contributions or technical writing that demonstrates expertise

Technical Challenges You Should Thrive On

• Building a real-time collaborative interface with 60fps animations
• Implementing robust state machines for multi-step AI workflows
• Optimizing render performance for data-heavy dashboards
• Architecting reusable component libraries for multi-product scaling

Why This Role:

• Join a rocket ship just before liftoff massive trajectory already underway
• Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• Direct impact on product, culture, and trajectory
• Work with a highly capable, fast-moving team that actually ships

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Information Technology

• Industries

  Software Development and Technology, Information and Media

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