Front-end engineer

ABOUT YOU

You’re a product-minded engineer: a front-end developer with a keen eye for design, and the ability to deliver beautiful yet functional user interfaces for complex products.

You consider yourself more of a front-end specialist, but you also have some full-stack experience, or at least a good understanding of how the back-end works. You’re a well-rounded, startup-ready, battle-proof engineer - you know how to hack things together for a quick and dirty proof of concept, but you’re also able to turn it into beautiful, production-ready code.

You’re inquisitive, self-motivated, and excited by the prospect of working with ground-breaking technology. You love a challenge and teaching yourself new skills on the fly. You want to make a massive impact as one of the key first hires at an early-stage company.

You enjoy thinking strategically and future-gazing, but you’re also practical and not above getting stuck in to help the team.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Your challenge: leverage the transformative power of AI to deliver a beautiful and intuitive experience for end-users. Working directly with the founders, you will own and help build the early product, then scale and assemble a star team around it.

The back-end we're building, a knowledge graph, is much more powerful than run-of-the-mill databases. It radically changes how the data is structured, represented, and what insights can be derived from it (enabled by cool, cutting-edge applications of deep learning into graphs).

The back-end is only one piece of the equation however - we also want to leverage the power of the graph to change the way users visualize and interact with that data, and expose it to them in new ways.

To that end, we're looking for a brilliant designer / engineer / product person to help us build a front-end that can match and make full use of the capabilities of our back-end.

You’ll be primarily focused on building our user interface, a fully-responsive web app, using React and Redux. This is pretty much a greenfield project (our current UI is built on top of Slack), and will span the full spectrum of front-end development. You will own everything from UX/UI design, architecture and infrastructure setup (CI/CD, etc.), to building and interfacing with the backend via an API.

Although you won’t have to build the API yourself, it would be great if you had an understanding of how the back-end works so that you can contribute to design decisions.

You will also contribute to the wider product roadmap, help understand new customer requirements and prioritize new features. Beyond that, you will help define our processes and best practices (from a technical as well as cultural standpoint).

As we scale, there will be scope to recruit and lead a full technical team, growing into a Head of Product or VP Eng role, depending on your inclination.

REQUIREMENTS

Things you'll need:
- 3-5y+ of commercial development experience, of which a significant portion should have been at an early-stage company
- Deep understanding of React and Redux
- Demonstrable experience of having been deeply involved in all stages of software development, from inception to shipping production-ready software
- Ability to work well with users and understand what they really need

Bonus points for experience with any of the following:
- Building AI-enabled and/or data-heavy products (even better if you’ve dabbled with ML packages yourself)
- Complex data visualization projects (e.g. D3, WebGL, etc.)
- Back-end development, in particular with building APIs
- Fintech, data analytics, and/or SaaS

ABOUT US

Our founders met through deep-tech incubator Entrepreneur First, and have a mix of in-depth industry experience and deep technical expertise.

We’re tackling some ambitious, complex, deep-tech problems at the core of modern work. We aim to redefine human-computer interaction and set the standard in intelligence augmentation.

You’ll get to work with some of the most innovative technologies out there (supported by in-house research in conjunction with university labs), including:
- Knowledge-based systems
- Cognitive computing
- Graph theory and graph databases
- Natural language processing
- Machine / deep learning

As a core member of the early team, you will be heavily involved in crafting and developing our culture.

‘Ask more questions’ is our tagline. It is at the heart of our product (we enable our users to ask more questions, and also think of the right questions to ask) and at the heart of our company too. It is at the root of many other well-known principles that we support - from first-principle thinking to ‘strong opinions, weakly held’.

Our other, related founding axiom is ‘look for the desire paths’. We look for the shortcuts, the ways to do things better. Unconstrained by existing preconceptions, we have a healthy disregard for rules, and we don’t hesitate to question and circumvent them if it leads to better outcomes.