Frontend Architect

Role: Frontend Architect

Function: Frontend Engineering / Architecture

Location: Bengaluru

Type: Full-time

Industry: Information Technology & Services, Computer Software

About Company The company is an AI-native design tool startup operated by a parent entity backed by $44M. Investors include First Round, Chemistry, and Elevation Capital, with backing from senior leaders at OpenAI, Meta, Google, Ramp, and Stripe. The company's dual-canvas platform lets designers work directly on live production code. This eliminates static mockups and the friction of design-to-engineering handoffs. The team of 26 includes former designers and engineers from Google, Uber, and Slack. The culture is defined by high ownership, rapid iteration, and deep cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Position Overview This role serves as the technical anchor for the company's frontend organisation, combining deep-work execution with long-term architectural direction. The person in this seat will tackle some of the hardest frontend challenges in the industry: sustaining 60fps performance on canvases with thousands of AI-generated nodes, architecting real-time collaborative editing systems, and setting engineering standards that scale the product from early-stage to category-defining. It is a hands-on role with outsized influence over product quality and engineering culture.

Role & Responsibilities

• Own frontend architecture end-to-end: module boundaries, state and data flow, rendering strategy, and extensibility patterns across the canvas and editor systems.
• Drive the frontend technical roadmap through RFCs and architecture reviews, balancing speed-to-market with long-term maintainability.
• Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks across large documents, long sessions, and memory-intensive rendering — targeting zero perceptible lag at scale.
• Define and enforce standards for testing, CI quality gates, observability, and release reliability to maintain a zero-regression culture.
• Partner with Design, Product, and Backend on API contracts, distributed system tradeoffs, and cross-functional feature delivery.
• Mentor frontend engineers through code reviews, technical workshops, and architectural pairing — raising the craft bar across the organisation.
• Evaluate and introduce tooling, libraries, and patterns that meaningfully improve developer velocity or product performance.

Must Have Criteria

• 10+ years of professional experience building large-scale web applications, with 2–4 years owning frontend architecture and technical strategy.
• Mastery of React and TypeScript for complex, high-performance UIs — including component lifecycle, reconciliation, and rendering internals.
• Proven track record building large editors or complex UI systems: canvas renderers, node-based editors, multi-pane layouts, or timeline interfaces.
• Deep expertise in modern state management (Zustand, Recoil, Jotai, or Redux) and reactive data flow patterns at application scale.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve real-world performance issues — memory leaks, rendering bottlenecks, layout thrashing — in production environments.
• Experience architecting or contributing to real-time collaborative features (operational transforms, CRDTs, or WebSocket-based sync) in a production product.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience at a design tooling, creative software, or developer tooling company (e.g., Figma, Framer, Linear, Notion).
• Familiarity with WebGL, Canvas API, or GPU-accelerated rendering for high-node-count UIs.
• Experience working in early-stage startups (Series A or earlier) where architectural decisions directly shaped product trajectory.
• Exposure to AI-assisted UI generation or LLM-integrated frontend workflows.
• Prior experience as a Staff or Principal Engineer in a product-led engineering organisation.

What We Offer

• Best-in-class health insurance covering the employee and their entire family.
• Full-time, in-office role at WeWork Marathahalli — close collaboration with a high-ownership team.
• Direct influence over the technical direction of a product category that is redefining how designers and engineers work together.