UI Developer

UI lead React.js position
3 days a week from the client location: 2300 Yorkmont Road, Charlotte, NC, 28217
We will have an internal evaluation first, followed by 2 client rounds (1st remote and 2nd in person at the client's office).

Lead Level Engineer Responsibilities
Core Responsibilities
UI and API Leads are responsible for ensuring technical execution aligns with established patterns, frameworks, and guidelines. They are expected to identify gaps in those standards and collaborate with Architects to clarify or expand them. They lead by example, writing production-grade code, reviewing pull requests, and handling complex or ambiguous implementation work. In this capacity, they act as a first line of defense for code quality and are the go-to individuals when incidents or unclear behaviors arise in their domain.

As part of their role, leads are required reviewers for all production code changes. When faced with unclear guidance, they are empowered to make context-aware decisions. If the situation exceeds their depth or scope, they are expected to engage with Architects for support. Code quality should be deciding factor in reviews. Architects may at will participate in some of those reviews (especially for new applications), and verify the review quality.

In addition to day-to-day engineering, UI and API Leads are responsible for contributing to the Architecture Documentation for new features when those features can be implemented using known approaches, building a traceable knowledge base. Proposed solutions are expected to be reviewed and approved by Architects.

Leads also participate in Discovery and Design phases to provide input on technical feasibility and highlight any limitations in proposed solutions. That said, the majority of their time - approximately 80% - should remain focused on implementation and engineering work, with no more than 20% devoted to product and design discussions.

UI and API Leads also serve as the primary point of contact for engaging with the Architecture team on reusable components, unknown capabilities, or anticipated technical needs. They are expected to initiate those conversations early, recognizing that upstream architectural solutions require time to develop and validate.

Leads are integral to the production deployment process. In instances where a lead cannot be present for a scheduled deployment, it is their responsibility to ensure a designated and qualified representative attends in their stead. The Lead should notify their manager of the conflict for transparency and to help managers in their work. Leads are accountable for addressing and resolving any issues that arise following the deployment of a solution. Leads are expected to prioritize and actively monitor the performance of the solutions under their purview, ensuring optimal functionality and efficiency. In case performance criteria are vague, Leads should collaborate with Engineering Manager and Architect to define improvement points and make a plan how to get there.

basic requirements for UI developers are:
1. We're looking for recent experience with pure React+Typescript, with best practices from React 18 (like no CLASSical components or CLASSical HOCs). Frameworks on top of React (like NextJS) aren't what we're looking for.
2. No frameworks. NextJS and other frameworks "on top" or React are more a minus, than 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 I will get deep 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. Small product/company with 18 months contract is good fit. 6 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, but you can't have everything, and so `long term with ownership and freedom` is preferred over "huge corporation".
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 ought 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.
6. Experience with latest data routing from react-router-dom is a plus, but not a deal breaker
7. Experience with mono repositories will be a plus (NX workspace is a huge plus), but not a deal breaker
8. When I'm sure they're familiar enough with things listed above, I WILL ask about architecture layering, it's "why" and "how".
9. Practiced ownership over their engineering decisions, and being exposed to the autonomy and decision making outside of "what CSS style to apply here"

Required "soft skills":
10. Good speaking and written English.
11. Should understand and being able to explain what they're doing and how it works.
12. 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.
13. Able to take long term consequences into consideration when making decisions.
14. Familiarity with technical debt, consequences of having it, and ideas how to avoid having it.

We're not looking for "code generators" - ChatGPT is more than capable of doing that. 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.
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. 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, and I know they'll deliver. We want that. We don't want "my lead said to do it like so, and so I did".