“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
You’ve built dashboards, data visualisations and real-time screens that technical users rely on every day. You’ve built a design system from scratch rather than just consuming one. And you’ve got a portfolio of shipped UI to prove it. If that’s you, this is a first-front-end-hire role where you decide how the product looks and works.
The company
An early-stage, well-funded AI start-up with a small, senior team and a growing base of enterprise customers. Fully remote across the USA. You’d work directly with the CEO.
The role
You’ll be the first front-end engineer. There is no front-end codebase and no design system yet, so you’ll own both from day one and set the standard everyone else builds to.
What you’ll build:
- AI-generated answers that stream in and link back to their exact source
- Review and approval queues for AI outputs
- Document upload and correction workflows
- Interactive data and relationship-graph exploration views
- Dashboards tracking model and system performance
- The component library and design system every engineer and customer-facing app will run on
This is product UI for technical users. Think analytics tool, not consumer app. Full-stack engineers whose strength is front-end are welcome.
What you must have
- Shipped data-heavy product UI: dashboards, data or graph visualisations, real-time or streaming data views
- Built and owned a design system or component library yourself (using one doesn’t count)
- A portfolio or live examples of UI you’ve shipped, ready to share with your application
- 3+ years of front-end engineering on B2B or data-heavy web apps (senior profiles preferred)
- Production React and TypeScript
Nice to have
- Early front-end hire at a start-up, building product UI from nothing
- Full-stack comfort, happy to write an API endpoint when it’s needed
- Experience with Figma MCP or similar AI design-to-code tooling
Probably not the right fit if
- Your experience is mainly marketing sites, landing pages or e-commerce checkout
- You’re a backend-leaning full-stack engineer with limited front-end ownership
Compensation and logistics
- Base $150K–$205K, depending on experience
- Competitive equity, weighted for an early hire
- Fully remote within the USA
- Full-time
- US citizens and Green Card holders only. No visa sponsorship is available for this role
Interview process
Live, conversational technical interviews. No take-home test, no live coding. Four rounds, roughly two and a half hours in total.
How to apply
Apply with your resume and a link to your portfolio or live work. Applications without examples of shipped UI won’t progress, so include the link.
You can also email Keiran Hathorn directly at keiran@bigwavedigital.com.au with your resume and short answers to these three questions:
- Describe a data-heavy UI you’ve shipped (dashboard, graph visualisation, real-time or streaming view). What did it do and who used it?
- Have you built and owned a design system or component library from scratch? What did it cover and who else built on it?
- A link to your portfolio or live examples of UI you’ve shipped.
Big Wave Digital is an AI and tech recruitment agency placing engineers with US start-ups from San Francisco to New York. We’ll review every application and come back to you.
