Senior Front End Engineer

About Us

We’re a startup with big ambitions: to make estate planning modern, visual, and intelligent. Vanilla is the first AI-powered estate advisory platform, built by advisors, planners, and attorneys to transform how wealth is transferred across generations. Our technology unifies scenario modeling, client visualization, and document creation into one seamless, digital experience.

Our team brings together diverse subject matter expertise across estate planning, wealth management, and scaling SaaS startups. We’re distributed across the U.S., with a mix of fully remote and hybrid roles, and we embrace flexibility while staying closely connected. At Vanilla, you’ll join curious builders and problem-solvers who thrive on speed, autonomy, and impact. Here, you won’t just join a company, you’ll help create it. If you’re excited to tackle hard problems, move quickly, and see your work shape both an industry and a growing startup, we’d love to meet you.

Working Location

This role is a remote position, you must be based out of one of the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah or Washington

Job Summary

We're looking for a deeply experienced Senior Front End Engineer to raise the bar for frontend architecture and quality in our AI team, align it with the broader application best practices, and help promote frontend excellence across teams.

This is not a feature factory role. This is a high ownership, cross team leadership role.

What You’ll Do

• Own frontend architecture and quality for all AI features.
• Align AI frontend implementation with wider application standards, including shared components, service API patterns, and design system usage.
• Partner with organization frontend leaders to learn, internalize, and propagate best practices across teams.
• Contribute to and evolve our shared design system and atomic component architecture.
• Drive consistency across shared components, service APIs, and UI patterns.
• Lead large, complex frontend initiatives end to end.
• Work closely with Product and Design to translate ambiguous ideas into scalable, high quality UI systems.
• Provide strong technical direction and mentorship to frontend contributors.
• Establish frontend observability and tracking standards, including analytics and instrumentation.
• Ensure performance, accessibility, and maintainability across the UI surface area.
• Collaborate with backend and ML engineers to integrate AI powered experiences into a production grade frontend.

What We’re Looking For

Senior Level Frontend Depth

• 5+ years of frontend engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in React and TypeScript.
• Strong understanding of atomic design principles and scalable component architecture.
• Proven experience contributing to or leading a design system.
• Experience maintaining frontend quality across multiple teams or product surfaces.
• Experience with GraphQL and/or RESTful APIs.

Technical Leadership

• Communicates blockers and concerns early, with clear reasoning and a focus on business impact.
• Able to advocate for quality and architectural direction with concrete examples and data.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising frontend standards.
• Experience using AI tools to assist in development and design.

Product & Quality Mindset

• Experience implementing analytics and tracking.
• Familiarity with tools like Datadog or similar observability platforms.
• Preferred experience running or implementing A/B tests and using experimentation to inform product decisions.
• Strong collaboration history with product designers using Figma and wireframes.
• Comfortable resolving design inconsistencies proactively, not passively.

Cross Functional Strength

• Experience working across teams and bringing alignment to shared patterns.
• Able to embed temporarily with another engineering group to internalize best practices and bring them back.

Nice To Have

• Experience integrating AI or ML driven features into production UIs.
• Familiarity with GraphQL and service oriented frontend architecture.
• Experience working in fast growing startup environments.
• Experience with Rails or Python is a plus.

Why This Role Matters

VAI is at an inflection point. We need a frontend leader who can elevate quality, align with application frontend standards, and confidently deliver large scale UI projects. This role will directly influence how AI powered features are experienced by advisors and ensure frontend excellence across the platform.

The salary range for this role is $130,000 to $160,000 Our compensation packages also include a performance based bonus and equity. Compensation is based on a number of factors and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for sponsorship now or in the future. Vanilla is unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.

Benefits

• Flexible paid time off policy and 10 company-wide paid holidays
• Parental leave, 4 weeks for all full-time employees and up to 12 weeks for birthing parents
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits coverage for employees and their families
• 401K eligibility after one month of employment
• Free estate planning documents
• Budget for learning & development and home office setup
• Paid parking or transit for hybrid and in office employees

Vanilla Technologies Inc. (dba "Vanilla") provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Vanilla participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S.

Key skills/competency

• Frontend Architecture
• React.js
• TypeScript
• Design Systems
• Atomic Design
• GraphQL
• RESTful APIs
• Technical Leadership
• UI/UX
• Observability