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Restate is a lightweight runtime that makes AI agents, workflows, and backend services durable and reliable. We're hiring a Senior Frontend Engineer to own the product experience across Restate's UI—a live window into distributed systems where developers troubleshoot failures and monitor execution in real time.
The Role
You'll architect, build, and ship Restate's product UI end-to-end. This isn't typical frontend work: the data is large and constantly changing, users are often under pressure, and the interface must surface execution timelines, retries, queues, state, and failures with clarity and speed. You'll own the full stack from whiteboarding with engineers through production maintenance.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and build a high-performance UI that handles large datasets, live updates, filtering, search, and visualization (charts, timelines, traces).
- Optimize for latency: rendering cost, data loading, and perceived performance are design decisions, not afterthoughts.
- Implement safety and security: render untrusted content safely, manage auth and sessions, and control destructive actions (stop, retry, delete).
- Improve interaction models: keyboard navigation, deep links, state persistence across refreshes.
- Grow and maintain a shared component library to keep the product coherent as it scales.
- Work closely with design and engineering—skip traditional handoffs, iterate together from sketch to ship.
- Read and work with backend code, APIs, and queries to understand system behavior.
Why This Matters
Durable runtimes are becoming foundational infrastructure for AI and backend systems. Restate is already used by Fortune 500 companies (including Tier 1 banks running critical financial workflows) and cutting-edge AI startups. You'll work on problems where reliability, correctness, and operational simplicity are existential.
The Team
You'll partner with engineers who've built foundational systems at scale—creators of Apache Flink and leaders from Meta's messaging infrastructure. You'll have direct access to the founding team and significant autonomy.
Requirements
Must-haves:
- Several years of production React and TypeScript on applications large enough to get messy.
- Proven performance optimization: profiling and fixing slow rendering, long lists, wasted re-renders, bundle size (with measurable before/after numbers).
- Experience building data-intensive interfaces: datasets larger than viewport, pagination, virtualization, filtering, search, real-world charts.
- Strong data fetching and client state management: caching, invalidation, polling, streaming, optimistic updates, handling slow requests.
- Security mindset: rendering untrusted content safely, auth/sessions, dependency tree awareness.
- Information design skills: deciding what to show, what to hide, creating dense views that read clearly.
- Accessibility knowledge: semantics, focus management, keyboard navigation, assistive technology support.
- Ability to read backend code, API specs, and queries without writing the backend.
- Testing discipline: unit and end-to-end testing with good judgment about which tests matter.
- Daily AI literacy: using AI tools to move faster and knowing when to discard output.
Nice-to-haves:
- Prior work on developer tools, observability, or infrastructure products.
- Data visualization experience: timelines, traces, graphs, time series.
- Production design system building and maintenance.
- Multi-tenant SaaS experience: environments, roles, quotas, usage.
- Willingness to open backend PRs when features need new endpoints.
Not a fit:
- Expecting finished designs to hand off or heavy direction.
- Preferring to stay above the API layer.
- Wanting to run an engineering team rather than be the senior IC doing the work.
- Lacking interest in the technical subject matter.
