Staff Frontend Architect

Job Description

Job Description

About Monstro

Monstro provides the AI-powered Financial Intelligence System for regulated financial institutions. It enables banks and wealth managers to deliver continuous, personalized, governed Financial Guidance to every client, not just the top tier, across their entire financial life: saving, borrowing, investing, planning, protecting, and preparing.

Meaningful Financial Guidance has only ever been available to a small portion of people. We are changing that, through the institutions people already trust. Institutions already have the relationships, the data, and the context to understand each client; Monstro turns that understanding into guidance that helps each person understand, decide, and act. For clients, that means clearer decisions, proactive support when life changes, and a better view of their financial lives. For institutions, it means deeper relationships, more clients served consistently, and more of each client's financial life managed in one place.

What makes this possible is how the system is built. Governance is not an added feature; it is foundational. Every recommendation reflects the institution's own views, policies, and permissions. Every output can be audited, traced, and reversed, and client data stays under the institution's control. Generative AI is used to build and configure the system; at runtime, execution is deterministic, so every output can be explained and stood behind, not just trusted.

The work

We are building for a high-stakes industry where the work has real consequences. Guidance only matters if people can trust it and institutions can govern it. The challenge is to make Financial Guidance more personal and more available without making it less trusted: to build AI that institutions can audit, explain, and reverse, in a domain where being wrong carries real cost. That is what makes the problem hard, and the work meaningful. This is not a simple AI problem; it takes product judgment, technical depth, regulatory discipline, design quality, and a team that moves quickly without lowering the bar.

Monstro is moving from vision to market: launching with financial institutions, growing the team, and building for the enterprise in one of the most regulated industries. You will be expected to think clearly, communicate directly, move with urgency, hold a high standard, and take responsibility for work that matters. We are an early team building something ambitious, and what you do here will shape both the product and the company.

What You'll Do

Frontend Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Serve as the technical authority for frontend engineering at Monstro, owning the evolution of our frontend architecture as the product and engineering organization scale.
• Assess the systems and patterns we have today, identify architectural gaps and risks, and proactively define what needs to change rather than waiting for requirements to be handed to you.
• Own architectural decisions across our React and TypeScript stack, including application structure, component architecture, state and data management, navigation, API integration, performance, build tooling, and developer experience.
• Establish clear architectural patterns, standards, and guardrails that enable engineers across the team to contribute safely and consistently.
• Lead architectural changes from idea through adoption: develop the technical strategy, write RFCs where appropriate, build proofs of concept, earn buy-in, and drive implementation across the engineering team.

Hands-On Product Development

• Remain deeply hands-on in the code, building and owning meaningful product experiences across our React applications.
• Take complex frontend problems from ambiguity to production, balancing speed, maintainability, performance, user experience, and long-term architectural quality.
• Build polished, responsive, accessible experiences that meet the quality bar expected of software used by leading financial institutions.
• Work closely with product and design to influence solutions rather than simply implement specifications, bringing strong technical and UX judgment into product decisions.

Component Systems & Scalable UI

• Define and evolve our approach to reusable components and frontend systems, creating foundations that can support multiple products, workflows, and customer experiences.
• Establish scalable patterns for component architecture, theming, configuration, and reuse, including experiences that may ultimately be embedded or adapted within our customers' digital environments.
• Partner closely with design to ensure our implementation patterns support consistency, flexibility, accessibility, and a high-quality user experience as the product grows.

Embeddable, White-Label Component Library

• Architect and drive the creation of our SDK and white-label component system powered by our public APIs, allowing financial partners to natively integrate Monstro capabilities directly into their proprietary digital applications.
• You will take ownership of cross-brand theming, isolation strategies, component delivery mechanics, lifecycle governance, and partner-facing technical documentation as a critical, long-term technical initiative.

Quality, Testing & Engineering Guardrails

• Own the frontend quality strategy across unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, determining what should be tested, where, and how.
• Build quality into the development lifecycle through automated testing, CI/CD checks, static analysis, observability, and other engineering guardrails.
• Identify weaknesses in our existing frontend development practices and proactively introduce systems that prevent regressions and architectural degradation as more engineers contribute.
• Treat accessibility, security, performance, and reliability as foundational engineering concerns rather than downstream checks.

AI-Native Engineering

• Help define how Monstro uses modern AI development tools across frontend engineering, using tools such as Claude Code, Codex, and other emerging systems to improve development velocity and quality.
• Go beyond individual AI-assisted coding by establishing reusable workflows, context, standards, and guardrails that help the broader engineering team use these tools effectively.
• Continuously evaluate emerging tools and development practices and proactively introduce approaches that materially improve how the team builds software without lowering the quality bar.

Technical Influence & Mentorship

• Raise the frontend capabilities of the broader engineering organization through technical leadership, code reviews, documentation, pairing, tooling, and mentorship.
• Be willing to challenge existing approaches, surface technical debt and architectural risk, and advocate for better solutions even when doing so requires changing established patterns.
• Partner closely with backend, platform, product, and design teams to define clean system boundaries, effective API contracts, and scalable product architecture.
• Create an engineering environment where strong frontend practices are easy for other engineers to understand, adopt, and maintain.

What We're Looking For

• Significant professional frontend engineering experience, including demonstrated success operating at Staff, Principal, Lead, or equivalent technical scope.
• Deep expertise in React and TypeScript and a track record of architecting and shipping complex production web applications.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a frontend technical authority: defining architecture, establishing standards, and influencing how multiple engineers or teams build frontend software.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI-assisted software development tools and a thoughtful perspective on how AI can improve engineering workflows while maintaining quality and maintainability.
• Experience taking an evolving or inconsistent frontend codebase and introducing scalable architecture, patterns, tooling, and engineering practices.
• A track record of driving technical changes through adoption—not just identifying the right architecture, but building consensus, implementing it, and helping other engineers successfully follow it.
• Strong experience designing reusable component systems, design systems, or shared frontend infrastructure.
• Deep understanding of frontend testing strategy across unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, with experience establishing automated quality guardrails within CI/CD and use of systems like Storybook.
• Strong knowledge of modern CSS, responsive design, performance, and accessibility standards.
• Experience working across frontend and backend boundaries, including API contracts, authentication, state/data management, and system integrations.
• Strong product and UX judgment and the ability to collaborate closely with product and design while independently identifying technical and user-experience improvements.
• A proactive, opinionated, and pragmatic technical leader who is comfortable challenging assumptions, introducing new approaches, and raising the engineering bar.
• Clear communicator and mentor who can explain complex technical decisions, earn buy-in, and make the engineers around them better.
• Comfortable operating in an early-stage environment with ambiguity, high ownership, and significant influence over both the product and technical direction

Nice to Have

• Full-stack experience, including backend/API development experience (our backend is in Python)
• Experience building configurable, themeable, white-label, or embeddable UI/component systems
• Experience establishing frontend architecture or engineering practices in an early-stage company or rapidly evolving product environment
• Background in fintech, financial services, or another regulated industry
• Experience introducing AI-native development practices, tooling, or guardrails across an engineering team

Why Monstro?

• Impact : Build technology that helps millions of people make better financial decisions, through the institutions they already trust, and help define the category of Financial Intelligence.
• Ownership : High trust, high ownership, high standards. You will own meaningful problems end to end from day one.
• Experienced team : Work with leadership that has a track record of scaling companies from early stage to major exits.
• Principles-driven culture : We move fast, because the opportunity is urgent. We communicate directly, because clarity saves time. We hold a high standard, because institutions and clients need to trust what we build.
• In person, in New York : We are headquartered at The Spiral in Hudson Yards and work in the office four days a week, because our pace depends on fast collaboration.
• Compensation and benefits : Competitive cash compensation and meaningful equity, plus 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage, disability coverage, flexible PTO, paid parental leave, and catered meals.

Base Compensation Range (New York City): $249,000 - $298,000 

Final compensation will depend on a variety of factors, including experience, skills, internal leveling, and market conditions, and will be offered within the stated range in accordance with applicable pay transparency laws.

A Note on Interviewing: We sometimes use AI note-takers to help us transcribe interview notes, so we can be more present in your interview. If you'd like to opt out of us using automatic transcribers, please note this in the free text field in your application; otherwise we'll take your application as confirmation that you're happy for us to use note-takers (whether added to video calls or in the background).

Ready to Build With Us?

The standard is simple: do great work, own the outcome, communicate with purpose, move with urgency, raise the level. If that sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.