Founding Frontend Engineer (New York City Metropolitan Area)

Founding Engineer, Frontend

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

Type: Full-time

Stage: Early-stage, well-funded startup

About the Company

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.

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.

The Role

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.

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.

What You'll Do

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

What We're Looking For

• Strong hands-on experience with React, Next.js, and TypeScript in production
• 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
• Comfort working independently and making architectural decisions with minimal oversight
• 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
• Roughly 2–8 years of professional engineering experience
• A history of sticking with roles and seeing projects through — we're looking for someone who wants to build something over years, not months
• Based in or willing to relocate to the NYC metro area; this is an on-site role in Chelsea

What Would Make You a Great Fit

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

What This Role Is Not

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