Senior Frontend Engineer

Permanent role

Location: Our office is on Karangahape Road, Auckland, New Zealand. We offer flexible work arrangements, including optional remote days and full remote support for team members based in New Zealand.

Salary: Around NZ$140,000 - $165,000 depending on skills and experience + Employee Share Option Scheme participation + Benefits.

About Narrative:

Narrative is one of NZ’s fastest growing software as a service (SaaS) companies with global customers. Narrative builds products to serve the 5 million professional photographers worldwide, working to significantly reduce their processing time and to support their daily workflow with AI powered tools. We’re backed by top global VCs and proud to have some of New Zealand’s best talent collaborating to solve these challenges.

We have thousands of photographers using our products and we’re growing. This is a unique opportunity to join our team and build industry-leading AI products.

We're committed to building products for professional photographers who work with people from all genders, ethnicities, racial and religious backgrounds. We think it’s important that our team reflects the same diverse audience. We're actively working to grow a diverse team and offer: flexible and remote working options, extended paid parental leave in addition to government leave, reduced working hours for the same pay for new parents depending on how long you've been at Narrative (for all parents) and extended sick leave to support our team to get through the many things life can throw your way.

About the Role:

You’ll be working on Narrative’s engineering team helping to develop our product Narrative Select. You’ll join the team with a strong focus on frontend development. 

Frontend development at Narrative is unique. You won’t just be implementing UI and UX components; you'll be solving deep technical challenges at the intersection of performance, usability, and AI. You will be responsible for our Electron app, writing React, Typescript and NodeJS code that has access to the underlying OS. Select operates in a multi-process environment whether that be NodeJS processes, web workers, or Rust processes. This comes with its own set of considerations and concerns.

You’ll be dealing with problems not faced by traditional web apps. We are competing against native apps written in C++ using classic web technologies; a tall order for sure.

You’ll be working closely with Rust and AI engineers to deliver polished end-to-end features for Select. Given the nature of our product, we are a very performance-centric team. We’re always looking for new opportunities to make our product faster and to squeeze every last piece of performance out of the technologies we use. 

You will also be relentlessly product-focused. You will take a keen interest in how our users are using the product, and how they wish it was better, using hard quantitative and qualitative data to inform concrete product-driven decisions. You understand that everything is a tradeoff, and there are simply not enough hours in the day to do everything. To that end, you are constantly focusing on the most important issues for the product.

In order to succeed in this role, you will need to be curious. We want people who will bring a fresh perspective, questioning how things are done, and experimenting with new approaches and technologies. You will hold a senior role within our engineering team, helping to form a vision for the architecture of our app, preaching best practices, and advocating for better testing techniques. 

This is a rare opportunity to have influence and impact on a world-class product in an early stage and help make it a success.

About our technology:

Narrative Select is an Electron app built using Web technologies such as React and Typescript. We use Canvas2D for image rendering and transformations. Select’s brain is a speedy wee daemon called Maxwell written in Rust. Maxwell does all the heavy lifting for Select, including image processing and ML analysis.

You might work on:

• Building polished UI and seamless UX.

• Collaborating with your team and coming up with elegant solutions for hard problems.

• Squeezing every drop of performance out of web technologies

• Experimenting with more performant ways to decode and prepare images

• Mentoring colleagues through code reviews, knowledge sharing, and advocating for best practices within the product development team.

• Working with other team members to define requirements and API's for new Select features

• Evolving and contributing to our testing strategy to give us all assurance that Select is solid

• Helping streamline our deployment and testing workflow by extending CI/CD infrastructure

• Working with our product team to deeply understand the customers needs and the best way to deliver features and improvements

• Collaborate towards the establishment of detailed guidelines and standards for product development processes based on industry best practices and your experience

We're looking for someone who:

• Has many years of experience and has been around the block. Writing elegant and tested code is second nature to you

• You’re adaptable and willing to work across different parts of the stack, continuously learning as needed. We’re looking for a problem solver, not just a [specific-stack] developer.

• Has professional experience with modern web technologies such as Typescript, React, RTK Query, Node, Redux, and TailwindCSS

• You build confidence, technical skills, and motivation in all team members regardless of their role in the company

Nice to have:

• Experience with Electron.

• Experience in dealing with image data.

• A keen interest in photography.

At Narrative, we're building AI software to help a wide range of people. We're looking for a team that shares our passion for this work. Research shows that some candidates apply when they meet about 60% of the criteria, while others hesitate unless they meet them all. If you're excited about joining Narrative and eager to grow, go ahead and apply - even if you don't check every box.

If this sounds like you, please apply with a cover letter and CV here.