Wordware
AI agents you can rely on
Senior Frontend Engineer
About the role
⚠️ Please read first
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This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio) - we work from the office 5 days a week.
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You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.
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We require US work authorisation , but are open to O-1 visa sponsorship for truly exceptional candidates.
What You'll Do
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.
Stack
TypeScript, React, Next.js, Y.js, TipTap, Cloudflare Workers.
Who you are
Minimum
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4+ years of frontend engineering with a portfolio that'll make the founders stop scrolling. We want to see complex, polished interfaces you've shipped.
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Expert in TypeScript and React — you understand reconciliation, when to bail out of renders, and how the browser actually works.
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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.
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You make design decisions — You'll need to own some UX decisions, create simple designs when needed, and unblock yourself.
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High autonomy, low ego — you don't wait for permission or perfect specs. You ship, gather feedback, and iterate.
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You care about craft — details like loading states, empty states, error messages, keyboard shortcuts. The 1000 small decisions that make software feel good.
Bonus (but not required)
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Built with Y.js, Automerge, or CRDTs for real-time collaboration.
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Experience with rich text editors (ProseMirror, TipTap, Slate).
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Built interfaces for LLM-based tools (streaming responses, handling uncertainty, progressive disclosure).
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Experience with local-first architectures (IndexedDB, service workers, sync strategies).
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Design background or strong visual sense — you can make things look good without a designer.
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Been a founding frontend engineer and established standards from scratch.
The Process
We keep our process simple. Exceptional candidates go from first touch to offer within 2 weeks.
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Application
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15-minute intro call
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45-minute technical interview
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System design interview
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Final conversation
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Work trial
About Wordware
AI Agents have arrived. They are powerful enough to read, plan, and act across your everyday life and work. The question is no longer whether they can run canned demos to check the weather, it’s whether real teams can rely on them for critical work. We optimize for adoption over spectacle: useful, accountable systems that help top professional complete real tasks.
About Wordware. Wordware is backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator, with a $30M seed round. Our beautiful, historic San Francisco office sits in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s full of plants and radiates innovation and calm. We genuinely love working together. At lunch we talk about alignment and AI consciousness, we have surfboards in the office ready to use, we take walking meetings on the beach and hang out after work at the bar or climbing wall. We work really hard because we care deeply about what we do.
About Sauna. Sauna is Wordware’s AI workspace for professionals. Think ‘Cursor for Knowledge Work’ and you’re halfway there. With explicit permission, it connects to tools like Gmail, Calendar, Slack, and thousands more, to gather the right context to move your work forward. It learns who you are, drafts and refines your documents, presentations, and datasets, researches across the web and your org’s internal knowledge, summarizes long threads to cut through the noise, proposes next steps, even acts on your behalf when enabled. You can work with Sauna live, side-by-side, or schedule jobs to run automatically in the background, with clear permissions and easy off-switches. Sauna brings the power of AI Agents to all professionals.
Startups are intense, but the intensity is intentional here. We work in focused sessions, cool down, and go again. You’ll have real ownership, clear outcomes, and the satisfaction of seeing your work land with customers, not months from now, but this week. If you’re joining Wordware, you’re choosing impact over spectacle. You’ll shape the product, the standards, and the way we work together. It’s demanding but humane: we write things down, respect time off, and prefer steady progress to late-night heroics.
Who thrives here? People who like small, correct moves that compound. People who stay calm when the plan changes and make the next good decision without drama. People who treat constraints as design inputs, not roadblocks. If you’ve built something from scratch, carried it through the unglamorous parts, and kept your standards high, you’ll feel at home.
We’re not optimizing for résumé lines; we’re optimizing for judgment. You don’t need to be loud. You do need to be reliable, curious, and willing to own outcomes.
We judge by what you build, not when you build it. Weekends are for life. Burnout doesn’t make good software. We’re aiming for something durable and generational, and that requires knowing when to push and when to recharge. If that balance and this mission resonate, we should talk.
Don't see your role? If what we’re building clicks for you and you’re exceptional, tell us. We’ll consider shaping a role around the right person.
How to stand out? Show us signal. Build something with Sauna, send a short note on what worked and what didn’t, or point out a concrete way to improve the product. Clarity beats volume. Initiative beats polish.
If you’re truly excellent, a LinkedIn link is enough—ping it to lucy[at]wordware.ai
