Frontend Engineer & UI Designer; Developer Tooling

Frontend Engineer & UI Designer (Developer Tooling)

We are looking for a builder-designer hybrid who makes a developer-facing product feel premium. You design it in Figma and ship it yourself in Hotwire. If you sweat the 200ms of jank nobody else notices, and you have both the taste to design the thing and the skill to build it in production, this role is for you.

Search Api is a real-time SERP API delivering structured data from 100+ search engines and sources, including Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Jobs, Bing, Baidu, You Tube, Amazon, and many more. We power production workloads for Fortune 500 companies, AI startups, and developers who need reliable search data at scale.

We’re a lean, profitable, bootstrapped team. No VC pressure, no bloat. Just people shipping real products to real customers.

• You own what developers judge us by. The dashboard, the API playground, the docs, the marketing site. The first impression of our product is your work.
• Design and build, no handoff. You take a feature from a Figma mockup to a merged PR yourself. No designs thrown over a wall.
• Real impact. A small team means your work shows up directly in signups, activation, and revenue.
• The best users to design for. You build developer tools for engineers, the most demanding and rewarding audience there is.
• Bootstrapped and Profitable. We answer to customers, not investors.

We'd rather hire one person with taste who can ship than a designer and a frontend developer who need a handoff between them.

• Ruby on Rails 8 with Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus)
• Tailwind CSS and View Component
• esbuild for Java Script
• Figma for design
• Native HTML first (), Turbo Frames over single-page-app frameworks

We use Cursor, Claude, Git Hub, and Slack daily. We ship multiple times a day with CI/CD.

We ship faster because we use AI tools aggressively, Cursor and Claude. You scaffold components, generate layouts, and iterate on design variations with AI. But you own every pixel and every line that lands. You can tell when an AI-generated layout is generic slop and turn it into something with taste. If you can’t, you’re not ready for this role.

• Design and ship, not hand off. Take a feature from Figma to a merged PR:
  View Components, Stimulus controllers, Tailwind, the whole thing.
• Own the dashboard. The logged-in experience: usage analytics, request history, billing, API keys. Make a data-dense console feel calm instead of cluttered.
• Build interactive API playgrounds. Where a developer fires a real request and watches structured JSON come back live. Make it the thing people screenshot and share.
• Own the docs and marketing experience. Keep the component system coherent, fast, and beautiful as the product grows week over week.
• Build honest data viz. Turn raw metrics into charts a developer trusts at a glance, using a consistent, semantic color system.
• Hold the line on craft. Native HTML first, Turbo Frames over client-side state, Tailwind over inline styles. Push Hotwire to its limits before reaching for a dependency.
• Clean up as you go. Tame the JavaScript bundle, kill dead CSS and one-off controllers before they pile up.

You own the front end. We don't hand you pixel-perfect specs. You decide what deserves polish now and what ships good-enough, and you make the call.

This role is not for everyone. Here’s what makes it hard:

• Hotwire-first, on purpose. If your instinct for every interaction is to reach for React, you’ll fight the stack instead of using it. The fun, hard part is getting SPA-grade polish out of Turbo, Stimulus, and native HTML.
• You design AND build. Plenty of people do one well. The bar here is taste plus the discipline to ship it in production code, with tests, that passes review.
• Developer tools are unforgiving. Your users notice a 200ms jank, a misaligned monospace column, or a chart that lies. There’s nowhere to hide a sloppy detail.
• Wide surface, one owner. Dashboard, playground, docs, marketing. You constantly decide what to polish and what to leave, with no PM holding the list for you.
• Taste is subjective. You’ll defend a design decision in…