Why This Role, Why NowYou'll be our first frontend engineer. You'll own the function.
We have a growing customer base and a deep backlog of things they're asking us to build. We're expanding Petra into new user flows and product surfaces every week. When you ship something good, customers feel it fast, and every win builds Petra's reputation and earns the trust to do more for them.
You'll be the domain expert for how it feels to use Petra. You'll collaborate with our design team to decide what great looks like, then build it.
What You'll Do- Turn rough ideas into shipped product. Start from a loose Figma exploration, a customer problem, or a half-formed intuition, and take it all the way to production-ready UX.
- Raise the bar for product quality, end to end. Visual design, interaction design, accessibility, responsiveness, performance, and the micro-details most people never get to. You care about how the whole thing fits together.
- Prototype in code. When Figma is too slow or too static for motion, interaction, keyboard behavior, AI workflows, or information-dense views, you build the real thing to find the answer.
- Show up as part of the customer's team. Talk to MSPs and security teams, map their workflows, find their time-sinks, and turn what you learn into UX they can feel.
- Build foundational systems. Reusable primitives, design tokens, and component APIs: the difference between a one-off fix and a system that holds up as we grow 10x.
Our stack is React, TypeScript, Node, and Python... for now.
Who You Are- You build for real problems. Everything you ship traces back to a real user need, not tech for its own sake.
- Taste. You notice when something is off, and you know how to fix it.
- Real empathy for users. You think about how people actually use software and you excel at putting yourself in our users' shoes.
- Comfort with ambiguity. Give you a vague product area and you'll form an opinion, try a few things, get feedback, and ship.
- You like both design and engineering. To you it's all one craft.
- Frontend range. You write clean, fast production React, and you go deeper than the UI layer when a problem calls for it. Performance-sensitive UI work is a plus.
- You use AI tools well. They help you move faster and try more, without doing your thinking for you.
- A bias to ship. You move fast without dropping the bar.
- Complexity is earned. You reach for the simplest thing that works, and you only add complexity when the problem truly demands it.
- Your own worst critic. You catch the flaws in your work before anyone else does.
- A body of work. You've shipped products, side projects, open source, anything with a clear point of view. We care more about what you've built than how long you've been building.
The TeamWe're small and high-caliber. Our founders are ex-Abnormal Security, Palo Alto Networks, and Bridgewater. Other early team members include:
- A Sequoia-backed founder
- An engineering leader from Anduril
- Quants from Citadel and Point72
You'll work directly with people who are exceptional at what they do.
Benefits and Pay- Competitive salary. We pay top dollar for exceptional engineers.
- Equity
- Healthcare, dental, vision
- Lunch and dinner when working in the office
- 401K
- Commuting stipend
- Equinox discount
- Relocation support
This role is in-person, here in SF.
