Principal Frontend Engineer - Engine

Job Title

Engine by Gen partners with leading Financial Institutions to surface the richest, most comprehensive set of personalized financial product offers to the consumer. We are looking for an experienced Lead Engineer to support our world-class financial products marketplace.

We're looking for a deeply experienced front-end engineer with full-stack fluency who brings strong judgment and a thoughtful critical perspective. This role is not about producing baseline code quickly. Modern AI tools can do that. It's about collaboration, setting direction, making sound decisions, and driving technical quality. You will leverage AI agents as force multipliers while maintaining a high bar for correctness, maintainability, testability, and operational excellence.

Success here depends on engineering judgment—choosing the right solution, not just producing code.

Key Responsibilities

• Take Ownership: You'll be accountable for upholding a high bar for quality through design reviews, code reviews, test strategy, and production readiness.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with product, design, and fellow engineers to shape solutions, clarify tradeoffs, and deliver reliably.
• Architect for change: Design and build full-stack, frontend-leaning systems that are intentionally small, composable, and resilient to evolving product requirements.
• Improve Performance & Quality: Enforce architectural and operational quality, catching subtle issues that are easy to miss in fast-moving, AI-assisted development.
• Champion Functional Patterns: Champion functional programming principles and immutability to reduce side effects and make systems simpler to reason through and debug.
• Lead AI-assisted development: You'll use AI assistants/agents for prototyping, scaffolding, refactoring, and exploratory development, then harden the result and rigorously validate through tests, reasoning, and edge-case review.
• Raise quality through testing: Build and maintain a strong automated test suite of unit, integration/contract, component/UI, and end-to-end coverage, with fast feedback loops in CI.

About You

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience building production web applications and 1+ years as a principal engineer.
• Expert-level proficiency with TypeScript, strong experience with React, server-side rendered Next.js (or similar), and performant component-driven development (e.g. Reshaped UI).
• Ability to articulate complex technical trade-offs to stakeholders and translate product vision into high-fidelity technical direction.
• Demonstrated development of simple, reusable, changeable systems (with examples of refactors, platforming work, or scalable patterns).
• Preference for functional programming and a deep understanding of why immutability is critical in modern frontend development.
• Advanced knowledge of the testing pyramid and how to use automated tests as a safety net for rapid, iterative development.
• Proven technical leadership through mentorship, delegation, and high-quality code reviews.
• Hands-on experience with tools like Cursor (or equivalent AI-augmented IDEs) and all modern coding models.
• Practical understanding of where AI is strong vs. where it falls short, paired with sound discernment in its application.
• Ability to use AI agents to quickly project multiple approaches, compare tradeoffs, and converge on the best solution without shipping "AI-shaped" code.

Gen is an equal opportunity employer, and we're committed to fair, inclusive practices at every stage of the candidate and employee journey. Employment decisions are based on merit, experience and business needs.