Founding Web Platform Engineer

Netic

$130K — $180K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years building and operating distributed systems
  • Experience owning a platform or core abstraction used by multiple teams
  • Deep understanding of data warehouses and transactional databases
  • Ability to design stable schemas and semantic models
  • Experience with observability and running high-uptime systems
  • Ownership mentality focused on long-term outcomes

Responsibilities

  • Design and own the semantic layer that powers the system of record
  • Build primitives and APIs for product teams
  • Collaborate with internal teams to eliminate friction and improve user experience
  • Architect systems spanning various data types and requests
  • Define long-term platform architecture and scaling strategy

Benefits

  • Work alongside a team from top-tier backgrounds (Meta, Stanford, etc.)
  • Opportunity to design foundational systems with real impact
  • In-person collaboration in a vibrant San Francisco office
  • Focus on customer obsession and high-quality craftsmanship
  • Emphasis on long-term outcomes and platform scalability
Full Job Description
You'll join our team with relentless builders from Scale, Databricks, HRT, Meta, MIT, Stanford, and Harvard in bringing frontier AI to the physical economy, where the problems are hard, the data is complex, and the impact is immediate and tangible.

As a Founding Web Platform Engineer, you will own the frontend platform that every product team at Netic builds on top of. Our Next.js application is already in production and serving customers - what it needs now is real platform structure underneath it: a design system and component library that product engineers reach for by default, app-shell primitives that make new surfaces fast to spin up, and the conventions for data fetching, forms, state, and routing that keep many product teams shipping in the same direction without each reinventing the basics.

What makes this role uniquely rare at Netic is that the platform sits between frontier AI products and the people actually running essential-services businesses. The interfaces you shape are how operators, dispatchers, and technicians experience AI in their daily work - so the abstractions have to be flexible enough for fast product iteration across verticals, and disciplined enough that every screen feels coherent, accessible, and fast. If you are excited to define how a company's product surface scales - from one app today to many product teams shipping confidently on shared foundations - this is an opportunity to build a durable, company-defining platform.

What You'll Do
  • Build the Design System and Component Library: Year one, this is the centerpiece. Define the tokens, primitives, and patterns; build a component library product engineers want to use because it's better than rolling their own. Own accessibility, theming, and the contracts that keep the UI coherent as the company grows.
  • Create Frontend Platform Primitives with Leverage: Build the app shell, routing conventions, auth/session handling, typed API clients, data-fetching patterns, form and table frameworks, and the state primitives that product teams compose into features. Your success is measured by how easily other engineers ship powerful AI-driven product surfaces on top of your work.
  • Treat Product Engineers as Customers: Partner closely with product and engineering teams to understand their needs, eliminate friction, and design APIs and components that are intuitive, well-documented, and hard to misuse. Office hours, RFCs, migration guides - whatever it takes to make adoption the easy path.
  • Own Build, Performance, and Client Observability: Take responsibility for the Next.js build pipeline, bundle size, Core Web Vitals, error tracking, client-side logging, and feature-flag/experimentation plumbing. Make intentional tradeoffs around rendering strategy (SSR/RSC/CSR), caching, and code-splitting based on real product needs.
  • Set Frontend Platform Direction: Work with leadership to define the long-term architecture - build-vs-buy decisions, how the design system evolves, when to split into multiple apps or a monorepo, and how the platform scales as product surface area grows.


What You'll Bring
  • Frontend Platform Experience: 5+ years building production web applications, with experience owning a design system, component library, or core frontend abstraction used by multiple product teams. Deep React and TypeScript fluency; strong Next.js experience (App Router, RSC, rendering tradeoffs).
  • Design System Craft: You've built or substantially contributed to a real design system - not just a folder of components, but the tokens, primitives, accessibility baseline, documentation, and adoption story. You care about the difference between a component that works and one that's genuinely good to build with.
  • Abstraction Thinking: Ability to design component APIs, hooks, and contracts that remain stable over time while supporting rapid product iteration. You know when to generalize and, more importantly, when not to.
  • Operational Rigor: Experience with frontend performance work, observability (Sentry/Datadog/equivalent), bundle analysis, migrations across many consumers, and shipping with confidence to production users.
  • Ownership Mentality: You take responsibility for long-term outcomes, not just shipping code. You think in terms of leverage, developer experience, and second-order effects on every product team downstream.

What brings us together is our commitment to:
  • Live to build
  • Run through walls and win
  • Obsess over customers in each line of code
  • Lose sleep over the "almost perfect"
  • Show internal locus of control
  • Prioritize finesse: refinement of first principles thinking, execution, and craftsmanship

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