Founding Frontend Engineer

Job Description

Founding Engineer, Frontend

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Location: New York City (Chelsea) — on-site

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Type: Full-time

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Stage: Early-stage, well-funded startup

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About the Company

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We're an early-stage, venture-backed startup building next-generation markets and trading infrastructure. Our team is small, technical, and moves fast — every engineer we hire has an outsized impact on the product and the company's trajectory. We're past the idea stage: the product is live, the team is scaling, and we're looking for someone who wants to help define the frontend from the ground up rather than inherit someone else's architecture.

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We can't share the company name publicly at this stage of the search, but we're happy to disclose it in a first conversation.

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The Role

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We're hiring a frontend engineer to take full ownership of our client-facing product experience. This is not a "join a frontend team" role — it's a "be the frontend architecture" role. You'll be making the foundational technical decisions (state management, component structure, performance, tooling) as much as you'll be shipping features.

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We're flexible on background here: you don't need to have held a "Founding Engineer" title before. What matters is that you're genuinely comfortable being the person solely responsible for the frontend — comfortable making architectural calls without a team to lean on, comfortable being wrong sometimes and fixing it, and comfortable with the pace and ambiguity of an early-stage environment.

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What You'll Do

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• Own the frontend architecture end-to-end — from initial technical decisions to long-term scalability
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• Build and ship a fast, reliable, real-time product experience for a trading/markets platform, where performance and correctness both matter
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• Work directly with founders and design to translate product vision into a polished, production-grade UI
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• Set the technical standards (code quality, testing, tooling, performance budgets) for frontend work as the team grows
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• Make pragmatic build-vs-perfect tradeoffs appropriate to an early-stage company, without cutting corners that create real risk
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What We're Looking For

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• Strong hands-on experience with React, Next.js, and TypeScript in production
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• A track record of owning a substantial piece of a frontend — not just contributing to one — even if that wasn't at an official "founding" company
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• Comfort working independently and making architectural decisions with minimal oversight
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• Genuine interest in fintech, trading, or markets-adjacent products — prior domain experience is a strong plus but not required if you can demonstrate sharp product judgment
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• Roughly 2–8 years of professional engineering experience
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• A history of sticking with roles and seeing projects through — we're looking for someone who wants to build something over years, not months
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• Based in or willing to relocate to the NYC metro area; this is an on-site role in Chelsea
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What Would Make You a Great Fit

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• You've been the sole or primary owner of a frontend codebase before, at any size company
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• You care as much about how something feels to use as how it's built
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• You're energized, not intimidated, by the idea of having no frontend team to hide behind
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• You want real ownership and are comfortable with the tradeoff that comes with it — high autonomy, high accountability
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What This Role Is Not

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• This is not a role for someone who wants a large, established team structure around them
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• This is not primarily a backend or full-stack role — while comfort across the stack is a plus, the mandate here is frontend ownership
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• This is not a short-term contract engagement — we're hiring for a long-term, foundational team member
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