Frontend Engineer

Please read the job description carefully and fill out this short form, to apply for the role:
https://theproducthighway.keka.com/careers/jobdetails/128

The Product Highway is an AI-native product strategy and engineering firm that partners with businesses from the earliest spark of an idea all the way through to enterprise scale. We grew from zero to multi-million ARR within our first year, working with clients across India, APAC, Europe, and North America.

The conventional product/software industry is coming to an end. The line between product development and business development is disappearing. The best talent won’t spend a career maintaining one product — they’ll operate as forward-deployed product managers and engineers, building businesses end to end in small, high-leverage teams, one after another. That’s the vision we’re building toward.

AI got very good at the how — shipping code faster than ever. But almost nothing has changed in the what: deciding what to build, why, and in what order. That’s where we live. We believe software is an approximation of the real world, and what matters isn’t lines of code or sprint velocity — it’s whether the solution actually maps to how a business works, how customers think, and how value gets created.

From in-house AI project managers to near-universal adoption of tools like Cursor and Claude, we’ve rethought every conventional process from first principles. AI isn’t a feature we offer — it’s how we think, build, and deliver. The result: legacy systems rebuilt in under 6 months, enterprise platforms built in under 3, mobile applications shipped in under 1.
We only take on problems we find genuinely interesting and worthy of being solved, and we refuse to ship anything we wouldn’t stand behind. Every hire gets us closer to that standard.

Who we’re looking for

Regardless of role, every person at TPH shares these traits:

• End-to-end owners. You own outcomes, not tasks. If something you’re responsible for falls through a crack, that’s on you — not because someone assigned it, but because you wouldn’t have it any other way.
• Clear, direct communicators. Bad news doesn’t get better with age. Context doesn’t transfer through vague Slack messages. You surface problems early and communicate with precision.
• Uncompromising on quality. You have a quality bar that’s yours, not your manager’s. You won’t ship something you wouldn’t stand behind, even under deadline pressure.
• AI-obsessed. You see AI as how work gets done, not a nice-to-have. If you’re still doing something manually that AI could handle, you feel that as friction, not normalcy.
• Structured thinkers. When faced with an ambiguous problem, you break it down, reason through the trade-offs, and arrive at a position — not wait for someone to tell you the answer.
• Experienced enough to use AI systematically. You have enough depth in your craft that AI makes you dangerous, not dependent. You direct it, evaluate its output, and know when it’s wrong.

Why we’re hiring

TPH builds products for clients across industries — fintech, ecommerce, SaaS, enterprise data platforms, consumer apps. Every one of these lives or dies on the frontend. Users don’t interact with your API design or your database schema — they interact with the interface. The fastest, most reliable backend in the world means nothing if the product feels slow, looks broken, or makes users think twice about what to click next.

We need someone who understands that frontend engineering isn’t about translating Figma files into React components. It’s about building systems — component architectures that scale across a product, state management that doesn’t collapse under complexity, performance that holds up when real users hit it in production. You own the layer of the product that the client and their users actually see and judge us by.

This is not a project-specific hire. You’ll be deployed across different client projects over time — sometimes building a new product from scratch, sometimes rebuilding a legacy frontend that’s become unmaintainable, sometimes bringing design-system discipline to a codebase that has none. The common thread is that you’re the person responsible for making sure the frontend is fast, well-architected, and built to a standard that reflects TPH’s quality bar.

We’re looking for someone who’s primarily a frontend engineer but has the range to work across the stack when needed. You shouldn’t be the person who blocks on a backend change because you can’t read the API code — you should be the person who traces the issue to the endpoint, fixes it or proposes the fix, and keeps moving. Full-stack capability isn’t the job description, but full-stack willingness is non-negotiable.

And one more thing: AI has transformed frontend development more than almost any other discipline in engineering. You can scaffold entire component libraries with Cursor, generate UI from descriptions with v0, prototype interactions in minutes that used to take days. The frontend engineers who are still writing every line by hand are already behind. We need someone who’s fully embraced AI-assisted frontend workflows — not as a crutch, but as leverage that lets one person deliver what used to require a team. The quality bar doesn’t drop because AI wrote the first draft — it goes up, because you have more time to refine, optimize, and get the details right.

What you'll do

1. Own frontend architecture end-to-end — rendering strategy, state management, component design, performance budgets. You set the architecture, not inherit it.
2. Define and evolve frontend standards at TPH — component patterns, TypeScript conventions, testing strategy, AI workflow practices. What you establish becomes the team's baseline.
3. Mentor SDE-1 and SDE-2 engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and architectural walkthroughs. You make the people around you meaningfully better.
4. Lead client-facing technical conversations — discovery sessions, translating UI requirements into architecture plans, representing TPH's engineering standards to stakeholders.
5. Build and own complex interfaces — data-heavy dashboards, real-time UIs, AI-native UX patterns, multi-step flows. You take on the problems others aren't sure how to approach.
6. Translate design into production UI with precision — and push back when something won't survive production contact. You propose better alternatives, not just flag problems.
7. Step across the stack when needed — write API endpoints, fix backend issues. You don't let a backend change block a frontend delivery when you can solve it yourself.
8. Write code the team can build on — clean component APIs, proper TypeScript, meaningful tests, documented decisions.

Must-haves

1. 4+ years building production frontend applications — complex interactive products with real users, not landing pages or internal tools.
2. Deep expertise in React and Next.js — server components, app router, SSR/SSG/ISR, middleware. You understand the rendering model well enough to make and defend architectural decisions.
3. Strong TypeScript — generics, discriminated unions, type inference. This is how you design component APIs and catch bugs before they ship.
4. Has owned frontend architecture independently — state management strategy, rendering approach, data fetching. You've made these calls on production systems and lived with the consequences.
5. Has built or significantly evolved a design system or component library — not just consumed one, but established the primitives and patterns others depended on.
6. Has mentored engineers demonstrably — code reviews, architecture feedback, direct coaching. You've made other engineers better, not just been good yourself.
7. Performance engineering depth — bundle analysis, re-render profiling, Core Web Vitals. You've diagnosed and fixed real performance problems in production.
8. Comfortable across the stack — trace a bug to a backend endpoint, write a fix, unblock the team. Full-stack willingness is non-negotiable.

Strong pluses

1. Has led frontend teams or acted as technical lead in a consulting or services environment.
2. Has integrated AI features at depth — streaming LLM responses, chat interfaces, generative UI, AI-powered search.
3. Experience with animation and motion — Framer Motion, GSAP. You implement interactions that feel polished, not bolted on.
4. Experience with both React and React Native or Flutter — working across web and mobile makes you far more deployable.

AI-native expectations

1. At SDE-3, you're not just using AI tools — you're defining how TPH's frontend engineers use them.
2. Uses Cursor or Claude Code as primary development environment daily — components, refactoring, production features.
3. Sets AI workflow standards for the team — CLAUDE.md templates, .cursorrules patterns. What you systematize, others inherit.
4. Uses AI for rapid prototyping (v0, Claude, Cursor) and for code review, test generation, and documentation — but never ships AI output without reading it.
5. Coaches SDE-1 and SDE-2 engineers on AI-assisted development — prompting habits, review quality, holding the bar on AI-generated code.

Not the right fit if

1. You want to work on one product for years — this is a services role. The variety is a feature.
2. You think senior engineering is about writing better code, not raising the team's ceiling.
3. You've never mentored or led technically — we need someone who's made other engineers better, not just someone who's very good individually.
4. You refuse to touch backend code, or need fully specced designs for everything.
5. You don't use AI tools daily in your current work.