Job Title: UI Lead

About the Role

UI lead's role is about leading from a position of competence, systematic approach to problems,
and solid system design foundations. UI leads are first and foremost "doers", with mild team
coordination overhead. This is not a management position, nor it "technical visionary" position.
Things like solving vaguely defined problems, requiring PoCs and autonomous decision making
are normal. It is expected that UI lead will be proactive with interactions with architects, product
owners and management when something needs to be done or a judgement call needs to be made
for the problem they're solving.
We're not looking for "code generators" - ChatGPT is more than capable of doing that (and since recently - does it
better than most). We're looking for conscious thinkers, who can make decisions and own the project, led by
reasoning, deep understanding of the technology, and long-term consequences of their decisions and
actions. And yes - orchestrate AI workflows with quality in mind.
While we're part of immense international corporation, HDL organization is run as a lean startup,
and we're looking for people accordingly. Hiring people who "just write code" is not the goal. Hiring people, who
can say "I'll just do this entire thing myself, because it's going to be faster and higher quality" is (doesn't mean
they should - just being capable of). This phrase means ownership, thinking about long term consequences,
engineering autonomy, and proficiency in tech stack. This is how some of our current
contractors operate. We want that. We don't want "my lead said to do it like so, and so I did".
If a candidate has spent their past years reviewing the code and sitting on meetings, but not hands-on delivering
features into production - they will fail technical assessment. UI leads are 80% doers, 10% assisting management
and 10% interfacing with other people and teams.
Required Skills & Qualifications
1. We're looking for recent experience with pure React+Typescript, with best practices from React 19
(no CLASSical components or CLASSical HOCs).
2. No frameworks. NextJS and other frameworks "on top" or React are more a minus, than plus. No
"cross framework" competence. Candidates have to be deep into React and Typescript exclusively.
Broad exposure is a minus, not a plus.
3. Candidate should have recent experience with Redux and Redux Sagas specifically (not alternatives
like Zustand and other state management libraries). It can be ReduxJS Toolkit (also known as RTK), but
then candidates need to have deep insights into what it solves and why, and how it works. We're not
leveraging RTK too much in our code base. Understanding of what Sagas can do besides sending API
requests is a must.
4. Candidate should have recent experience working on long term projects with at least 12-14 months on
a single project/app, so that we could have candidates with correct mind set about how requirements
evolve with time, and how we can make ourselves ready to adapt to changing requirements. Working
for a big client on a wide portfolio of products is not the same, as working on a single product for a long
time. Big client is not big long product. Small product/company with 18 months contract is good fit. 6
UI Lead Revised Feb 2026
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months for huge international corporation is not. Long term contract with considerable degree of
engineering ownership and freedom for huge international corporation is the best.
5. Candidate should have experience with working/creating/maintaining basic components (buttons,
dropdowns, layouts, etc) without any 3rd party library such as Chakra, MUI, Antd, or others. They
MUST to be experienced with "styles-in-JS" pattern using either styled-components,
or @emotion/styled. Preferably including advanced patterns like custom themes, theme mapping and
wrappers, mobile responsive components, things like these. Interview WILL require working with
@emotion/styled, no exceptions.
6. Experience with data routing API from react-router-dom is a must.
7. Practiced ownership over their engineering decisions, and being exposed to the autonomy
and decision making outside of "what CSS style to apply here"
8. Good understanding of a higher level architecture, and be able to have reasonable discussion about
engineering and architecture conformity of the technical decisions they make.
9. Able to take long term consequences into consideration when making decisions.
10. Able to build and debug Docker file and assemble multi-container docker compose.
Preferred Qualifications
1. Good speaking and written English.
2. Should understand and being able to explain what they're doing and how it works.
3. Experience with mono repositories using NX workspace is a huge plus), but not a deal breaker
Nice to Have
Experience building custom orchestrations, "skills" and plugins on top of current gen of Ai Coding
assistants. Creative prompting into the chat is not it.
Hands on experience with CI/CD configs in Azure and IaaC in AWS.
Our basic requirements for UI developers are:
Required "soft skills":