Role description
Founding Software Engineer
Actual AIAbout Actual AI
The biggest barriers to AI adoption in software engineering are the friction of human context switching and the opacity of context for AI agents. Actual AI is the glue that enables the modern software‑engineering team. Already serving Fortune 20 customers, we're hiring founding engineers who want to change how software gets built - forever.
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Why we need you
Our service is only as good as the surface it lives on. Customers expect a polished, effortlessly‑fast UI that feels at home in both our cloud and their air‑gapped data center. We need a front‑end architect who can turn complex engineering data into an intuitive product experience and package it so it runs anywhere.
What you'll do
- Own the front‑end architecture: evolve our Next.js app (RSC, Vite, Turbopack) into a modular, plug‑in‑ready codebase that scales with the business.
- Build a reusable design‑system & component library (Storybook + Tailwind) shared across marketing, docs, and the core product.
- Craft interactive dashboards and data‑viz that help VPs, EMs, and ICs answer “What’s happening in my codebase?” at a glance.
- Package the UI for self‑hosted installs—static asset pipelines, CDN fallback, config‑as‑code themes.
- Champion accessibility, visual polish, and consistent UX patterns; mentor teammates in front‑end best practices.
- Dogfood our engineering manager agent and be highly opinionated about its design.
You might be a great fit if you
- Have 4+ years building production React/Next.js applications that ship to paying customers.
- Have led or significantly contributed to a design‑system or component‑library initiative.
- Understand how to bundle, cache, and serve large apps without being a “perf only” specialist.
- Are comfortable writing TypeScript end‑to‑end and enjoy collaborating closely with designers and backend engineers.
- Have opinions on data‑viz libs (Recharts, d3, visx) and know when to roll your own.
- Bonus points: You’ve built at a fast growing startup and dealt with growing pains first hand.
- Bonus points: experience packaging front‑end apps for on‑prem / air‑gapped deployments, or shipping browser‑based developer tools.
- Extreme bonus points: You’re already day dreaming about what you can accomplish with an unlimited AI tooling budget.
Compensation & perks
- $140‑$180k salary
- Large founding‑engineer equity
- Full benefits
- Relocation assistance
- Brand‑new hardware
- Truly unlimited AI‑tooling budget (seriously)
Hiring process at a glance
Incredibly simple and transparent. Absolutely no leetcode.
Start with founder chats. Follow with a 60‑min architecture deep dive. Then, a paid on‑site day. Wrap up with references & offer.
Apply for Founding Software Engineer - Front-End & Product Experience
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This position is fully on-site Monday–Friday in Seattle, WA (we do offer relocation assistance). Would you be comfortable with a 5-day, in-office schedule in Seattle, WA?Please select an optionYesNo
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