Front End Lead

Float is the world’s leading software for teams to plan their time and, behind it, is a world-class team looking for an experienced Front-End Lead to join us. From New York to the UK, Canada to South Africa—our Engineering, Product, Marketing, and Customer Success teams work asynchronously, helping brands such as Airbnb, Buzzfeed, and Ogilvy plan and manage their time better. Float is self-funded, profitable, and growing. If you’re a go-getter, align with our values, and are looking to join a team that’s passionate about helping others work and live more productively, we want to hear from you. Here are a few tips from our CEO to make sure your resume stands out from the crowd.

Why We’re Hiring For This Role

As a Front-End Engineering Lead, you’ll use your extensive knowledge of JavaScript fundamentals and comprehensive React-based SPA development experience to own Float’s front-end platform: a simple and intuitive interface relied upon internationally by top-tier agencies and teams to plan, schedule and track their projects. You’ll use your skills and expertise to overcome complex engineering challenges that go beyond routine state management.

You enjoy building data-intensive applications and want to push the boundaries of what component-based declarative front-ends can do. You particularly appreciate how such an approach can facilitate real-time collaborative user experiences. If that sounds like you, Float invites you on a journey full of challenges, fun, and gratification. You will own delivering highly performant, delightful, and consistent user experiences across web and mobile platforms.

We’re looking for an exceptional engineer to take our front-end to the next level. You’ll be leading by example, planning a roadmap, and preparing the necessary foundational work to ensure that the Float application continues to be best-in-class.

Our Director of Engineering, Colin Ross, explains the important role you will play within our Engineering team. Watch this video.

You’ll be working with senior front-end engineers to ensure that changes proposed for our web application are suitable both for the customer as well as the long-term health of our product and Float itself. You will monitor the impact of deployed changes to maintain the high standards of our product, following up as required and striving to be ahead of any uncovered trends.

What You’ll Be Responsible For

As a Front-End Lead, you will be a senior member of the Engineering Department, reporting to the Director of Engineering. You’ll be responsible for the overall direction and execution of Float’s front-end platform strategy, including:

• the future of our front-end architecture
• core libraries and components as part of our Design System
• collaborating closely with Product, Design, Mobile Engineers, and QA to specify, conceptualize, build, test, deploy, and monitor new features
• working with other senior engineers (including Performance Engineers) to set our app’s performance benchmarks, ensure they are maintained, and improved upon over time
• adopt common patterns for data access, state management, and code organization across all of Float’s front-end platform
• continuous integration and deployment of all front-end code across various environments
• reviewing and supporting front-end technical designs across feature teams
• participating in design discussions and roadmap planning to ensure front-end concerns are well represented
• maintaining and upgrading frameworks and tools for a great developer experience
  

You’ll be joining a group of seasoned engineers who can work independently and don’t require day-to-day management. Rather, you will bring your skills to focus on the longer term and the bigger picture, sweating the details as necessary to be confident we have a platform on which we can build for years to come.

Some example projects you might spearhead include:

• expanding the roll-out of TypeScript
• putting together code quality guidelines, and enforcing those programmatically and via code reviews
• mentoring our front-end team to be stronger engineers, and assisting with hiring additional team members
  
  

What You’ll Need To Be Successful

You’ll have spent a number of years working on web applications in a senior role and have a deep familiarity with the front-end ecosystem: including build systems, multiple frameworks as well as different styles of front-end development.

You will be expected to quickly become fluent with the majority of our existing tech stack which comprises:

• React
• Redux, for global state management
• Reselect, for derived state management
• Jest, for all things testing
• Yarn workspaces for seamless private package management in a monorepo
• React-spring & more, for intricate and performant visual interactions
• Exhaustive virtualization using open-source as well as in-house proprietary components that make rendering hundreds of thousands of data points a breeze
• WebSocket for real-time updates
• CSS-in-JS (currently styled-components)
• TypeScript (currently in gradual adaptation phase)
• And several other tools like Babel, WebPack, Puppeteer, Storybook etc.
  

Experience with the following would be a big plus.

• Local-first software - not just PWAs but fully-fledged offline capable web apps using CRDTs, IndexedDB etc.
• React-native or other native mobile app development platforms
• Working with distributed systems, event-based architectures at scale
  

You’re not a tyrant and are willing to be flexible as the situation dictates, acknowledging the value of consensus while recognising the benefits of having a clear vision.

Ultimately, you get more satisfaction from making a detailed plan and assessing the final deliverable than from necessarily doing the work yourself. You are looking to take on a role with high autonomy and corresponding responsibility in order to have a genuine impact on the Float team and our customers by means of your vision and strategy.

As a fully remote team, we’re looking for someone comfortable with asynchronous communication as the default, which means you have previous remote experience and are comfortable using tools like Slack, Loom, and Asana to communicate as needed. Don’t worry—you will have significant deep work time since we have very few meetings.

Why Join Us

We’re a global company with a diverse team of folks from all over the world who share a common belief in living our best work life. That includes a flexible asynchronous policy that allows you to work whenever you work best, minimal meetings, annual team meetups, and perks and benefits that support your personal health and well-being.

Our growing range of perks and benefits include:

• Home office expense budget
• Co-working expense budget
• Health & fitness budget
• Annual team meetup
• Care for your community donation or leave

We understand that you probably want to learn a bit more about us as well, so here are some resources to get a sense of who we are and how we work:

• Learn more about our team, mission and values
• Read more about our Best Work Life

The salary for this role is US $148,319 to $156,133 (Level 3.5 to 4). Here’s a blog post with more information on how we determine our salaries.

Note: Industry research shows that women and those in traditionally underrepresented groups generally don’t apply to jobs unless they check all the boxes for the role. If you feel strongly that you have what it takes for this role but don’t check 100% of the boxes—that’s okay—we encourage you to apply anyway and highlight what you can bring to the table.