Frontend Product Engineer

Job description

About Tacit We are an early-stage, deep tech startup based in San Francisco, developing innovative hardware that rethinks human-computer interaction. We are backed by General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, and Greylock Partners, with a founding team from Stanford, BrainGate, Oculus, and Tesla. While we can’t reveal too much just yet, our team is tackling cutting-edge engineering challenges to bring revolutionary products to life. ABOUT THE ROLE We are looking for a frontend product engineer to turn early ideas, prototypes, and design explorations into magical user-facing experiences. This is our first dedicated frontend hire: the interfaces you build are how people will actually experience silent speech. This role sits at the intersection of frontend engineering, product design, UX, and rapid product iteration. You’ll build polished interfaces in React, work through design and interaction details, prototype new product concepts, gather feedback from users, and refine experiences until they feel intuitive, beautiful, and accessible. You should be the kind of engineer who cares deeply about how software feels. You notice when a flow has one click too many. You have strong opinions about interaction design, visual hierarchy, motion, responsiveness, and the small details that make a product feel crafted. You can work from a rough whiteboard sketch, or a Figma file, and turn product intuition into code. You know who Engelbart, Kay, Weiser, and Rams are, and you understand why their work matters. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Work deeply in React and modern TypeScript to create fast, reliable, expressive interfaces for novel HCI workflows. - Translate intuitive product ideas into clear interaction models, UX flows, and high-quality UI implementations. - Prototype new product concepts quickly, test them with in-house users and external participants, and iterate based on what feels useful, delightful, and intuitive. - Improve onboarding, setup flows, data collection experiences, session flows, and other high-friction parts of the user journey. - Use qualitative feedback, instrumentation, funnels, and lightweight experiments to understand user behavior and make better product decisions. - Help establish frontend patterns, component systems, interaction standards, and implementation practices that let the team move quickly without sacrificing quality. - Sweat the details: layout, responsiveness, empty states, error states, loading states, accessibility, performance, motion, copy, and the overall feel of the product. REQUIREMENTS - Deep proficiency with React and modern TypeScript. - Strong frontend engineering fundamentals, including component architecture, state management, performance, browser behavior, styling systems, and testing. - A portfolio or track record of shipping polished, user-facing software that real people have used. - Excellent product sense: you can reason from user goals, identify friction, simplify workflows, and make pragmatic tradeoffs. - Strong UX instincts and visual taste, with the ability to work through multiple design iterations rather than stopping at the first functional version. - Ability to collaborate closely with technical and non-technical teammates, communicate design/engineering tradeoffs clearly, and take ownership of outcomes. - Independent work ethic, flexibility, impact driven, and resourcefulness. STRONG CANDIDATES MAY HAVE - A creative, artistic, design, or visual background, whether formal or self-taught. - Experience building design systems, component libraries, interactive prototypes, or highly polished consumer/product interfaces. - Experience with animation, motion design, canvas/WebGL, graphics, real-time interfaces, or other interaction-heavy frontend work. - Experience designing product experiments, instrumentation, funnels, dashboards, or feedback loops to guide iteration. - Experience working on products involving hardware, sensors, real-time data, ML-driven experiences, or novel human-computer interaction. - Familiarity with native frameworks such as iOS, macOS, Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, AppKit, or similar. - Comfort working lightly across the stack when needed, especially to unblock product prototypes or connect frontend experiences to APIs. - Curiosity about the history of input, wearable, and calm computing - 5+ years of software engineering experience and a bachelor’s degree or higher in a relevant field, or equivalent practical experience. COMPENSATION RANGE $160,000 - $210,000/year plus equity BENEFITS - Competitive equity package - Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance - Company size: 30-50 people - Unlimited PTO - Visa sponsorship - 4% 401k matching