Frontend Lead Engineer

At Koalafi, we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. That’s why we’re making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time.

Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers, while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M+ customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200+ Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers.

Interested in learning more about how we’re transforming the financing experience and joining our team?

You will help build the next generation of how our customers interface & apply for financing with Koalafi. Within the team you will champion and drive our front-end strategy as it continues to mature, and furthermore you will share your learnings with the broader Tech organization to help refine strategy within Tech as a whole. You’ll develop in the latest technologies as we continue to modernize legacy systems by moving to cloud-based micro-service platform(s), all while focusing on improving the customer experience by making it faster, simpler, and easier to use.

We want to deploy solutions early and often to find out what works and what doesn't, but we also want to ensure we are doing so in a targeted and analytical manner. Our new ecosystem utilizes technologies across the stack, including but not limited to:
React, GoLang, Postgres, and Kubernetes within AWS. These services work in tandem with our legacy platforms, which are still a part of our core business and must be maintained as we continue to decommission them piece by piece. So, if you are a strong engineer with the ability to learn and adapt, we would love to hear from you!

• Work with Design and Product to improve and maintain the application experience for both our customers and merchant partners
• Review and understand high level feature requirements to propose implementation options and define user stories
• Collaborate cross-domain to further understand potential impacts and limitations of proposed requirements
• Actively engage in agile processes including sprint planning, retrospectives, and daily stand-ups
• Oversee delivery of features step by step: develop implementation plans, coordinate tasks with teammates, communicate with stakeholders, devise testing strategy, and deliver to production
• Help to evaluate priority, troubleshoot, and resolve bugs across the stack

• Research and implement emerging technologies to improve system performance and customer experience
• Drive front-end strategy within the team, with a focus on maintainability and extendibility
• Champion new ideas to shape strategy for the Tech organization as a whole
• Act as a technical mentor, guiding engineers on best practices and modern standards pertaining to UI development
• Participate in code reviews to ensure high-quality standards as well as share knowledge across the team

• Improve application observability to better understand customer behavior and identify areas for improvement
• Minimize application bundle size and load times to minimize friction
• Utilize AI tooling in day to day tasks to streamline implementation cycles

• Four-year college degree in Computer Science/Engineering or Information Systems required
• 6+ years of experience with modern web technologies (React, Vue, Angular)
• React preferred
• Experience in UX from accessibility to user behavior to responsive/adaptive web design
• Knowledge of front-end tooling and best practices in areas such as state management, component libraries, and performance optimizations
• Experience in writing end to end test suites using tooling that simulates user behavior (Cypress, Playwright, etc.)
• Knowledge of building and consuming REST APIs using modern programming languages (Golang, Java, Node, Python, etc.).
• Understanding of HTTP/REST architecture and operation for APIs/Orchestration
• Knowledge of architecting and delivering applications in AWS
• Knowledge of scrum/agile software development process
• Exceptional…