Senior Frontend Engineer

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Please read first

• This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio) - we work from the office 5 days a week
  .

• You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting
  .

• We require US work authorisation
  , but are open to O-1 visa sponsorship for truly exceptional candidates.

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.

Type Script, React, Next.js, Y.js, Tip Tap, Cloudflare Workers.

• 4+ years of frontend engineering with a portfolio that will make the founders stop scrolling. We want to see complex, polished interfaces you’ve shipped.

• Expert in Type Script 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 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.

• Built with Y.js, Automerge, or CRDTs for real-time collaboration.

• Experience with
  rich text editors (Prose Mirror, Tip Tap, Slate).

• Built interfaces for LLM-based tools (streaming responses, handling uncertainty, progressive disclosure).

• Experience with
  local-first architectures (Indexed
  
  DB, 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.

We keep our process simple. Exceptional candidates go from first touch to offer within 2 weeks
.