Senior Frontend Developer

Senior Frontend Engineer — Product Delivery

Role Overview

We're looking for a Senior Frontend Engineer who ships complex product experiences end to end—from epic discovery with Product through design decisions and production-ready UI. You’ll lead the frontend on a Ruby on Rails platform while also building and evolving React-based experiences where the product needs richer client-side interaction. You’ll partner closely with Product Owners on epic scope and sequencing, sit in design decision meetings to turn UX intent into implementable systems, and use AI-assisted workflows to accelerate delivery without sacrificing judgment, accessibility, or code quality. This role is as much about shaping what we build as how we build it.

Key Responsibilities

Product & epic partnership

• Partner with Product Owners on epic planning: clarify outcomes, break ambiguous asks into shippable slices, surface frontend and platform constraints early, and align on acceptance criteria before implementation.
• Translate epics into technical workstreams—shared UI patterns, API/contract needs, edge cases, and rollout/migration considerations.
• Own features end-to-end: discovery → design alignment → implementation → QA handoff → production follow-through and iterative improvement.

Design decision & UX collaboration

• Participate in design decision meetings; challenge and refine interaction models for clarity, consistency, accessibility, and feasibility.
• Bridge design and engineering: propose alternatives when designs conflict with platform constraints, performance, or maintainability—and document agreed patterns for reuse.
• Champion consistent UX across complex flows (forms, multi-step composers, validation) so the product feels coherent as it grows.

Frontend engineering

• Design and build robust UI on a Ruby on Rails stack (ERB/views, Stimulus/vanilla JS or equivalent, asset pipeline) for production product surfaces.
• Develop and maintain modern React experiences for interactive or SPA-style product areas, balancing performance, accessibility, and maintainability.
• Own complex client-side behavior: state management, validation, character/segment limits, media-rich components, modals, and progressive enhancement where appropriate.
• Uphold frontend quality: readable structure, reusable partials/components, solid edge-case handling, and regression-conscious changes in shared forms and flows.

Full-stack & platform awareness

• Work comfortably across the Rails stack when frontend work depends on models, controllers, APIs, background jobs, or validation rules—without waiting for a handoff to unblock delivery.
• Collaborate on API contracts and data shapes so the UI stays resilient as backend capabilities evolve.
• Debug production UI issues with pragmatism: reproduce, isolate root cause (frontend vs. backend vs. data), and ship durable fixes.

AI-augmented craft

• Use AI development tools (Cursor and similar) to accelerate implementation, exploration, and review while keeping human ownership of architecture, security, and product judgment.
• Apply agentic workflows thoughtfully—scaffolding, refactoring, test generation, and PR review—knowing when AI speeds delivery and when careful, manual review is required.
• Raise the team’s bar on effective prompting, context management, and AI-assisted development practices.

Collaboration & mentorship

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, QA, and stakeholders to turn ambiguity into shipped features.
• Mentor peers on frontend craft, Rails/React patterns, and productive use of AI tooling.
• Communicate trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences; write crisp tickets, PR descriptions, and decision notes.

Required Qualifications

Critical requirements (must demonstrate all):

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep frontend expertise
• Strong production experience with Ruby on Rails–backed UIs (views, helpers, assets, frontend JS integrated with Rails)
• Hands-on experience building React applications (component architecture, hooks, state, performance, and accessibility fundamentals)
• Proven ownership of complex product UI: multi-step forms, validation-heavy flows, rich interactive components, and shared design-system–style patterns
• Experience partnering with Product Owners on epic-level work—scoping, sequencing, and refining requirements into delivery plans
• Regular participation in design decision forums; ability to influence UX toward feasible, consistent, accessible outcomes
• Hands-on experience developing against Dockerized applications (building/running containers, Compose-based local setups, troubleshooting environment issues that block frontend delivery)
• Solid grasp of frontend architecture patterns (componentization, progressive enhancement, separation of concerns, API-driven UI) and pragmatic design judgment
• Proven collaboration with backend engineers on contracts, integrations, and production issues across the stack
• Strong code-review practice: thorough, timely reviews that raise quality without blocking unnecessarily, and a track record of mentoring through review feedback.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across browser, JS, and Rails-adjacent layers
• Active proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar)—fluent in prompting, context management, and knowing when human judgment is essential
• Comfortable owning features from ideation through production monitoring and iterative improvement