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Senior Frontend Developer
Montréal, CANPosted 18 months ago
Full-timeremote
Job Description
About the Role
We're hiring a Senior Frontend Developer to own the Cadstrom user experience — the dense, technical, domain-specific UI that electrical engineers use to understand AI analysis, navigate validation findings, and drive design decisions on real hardware. The work demands taste, speed, and a deep respect for the expert users you're building for.
We move fast — the product is shipping, customers are live, and every week matters. This is a high-ownership role for a frontend engineer who treats Cadstrom's outcome as their own, and who doesn't need a designer or PM to hold their hand to ship great UX.
What are we doing?
We are accelerating the world's hardware ingenuity by blending generative AI, ML, and novel deterministic approaches to electronics simulation and validation. We're providing our enthusiastic customers intelligent and automated access to the most advanced validation tools to eliminate respins – helping engineers of all levels deliver their designs faster, cheaper, and with less waste.
Who are we?
We are a small team of innovators who are passionate about fundamentally improving how electrical engineers deliver electronics with higher confidence. We are backed by Bison Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and the Allen Institute for AI's Incubator. Our distinguished founders are responsible for creating the largest product development firm in the US, and building Azure Quantum (and more!) at Microsoft. We know you'll be in good company.
Key Responsibilities
- Build high-impact features across the Cadstrom frontend — dense, technical, data-rich UIs that present complex electrical engineering analysis to expert users. You own your work end-to-end while building alongside a tight team.
- Ship at speed with craft — take features from concept to production with the right balance of polish and pragmatism, and don't wait on permission to make things better.
- Drive UX excellence with strong opinions — bring informed, opinionated takes on what makes a UI excellent and pleasurable to use, then design, test, and iterate without needing hand-holding from a PM or designer. Pull in expert input when your own knowledge runs out.
- Reach into the backend when it matters — tune endpoints, shape payloads, and remove friction between the frontend and the data it needs to feel great.
- Establish frontend patterns the team can build on — component architecture, state management, accessibility, and performance.
- Partner with electrical engineering domain experts to translate how engineers actually work into UI that fits their mental model — not a generic SaaS template laid over an EE workflow.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years shipping production frontend with React and TypeScript.
- Experience building dense, technical, or domain-specific UIs — data tables, complex forms, technical dashboards, or expert-user tooling — at speed.
- Demonstrated ability to ship excellent UX end-to-end — bringing informed, well-formed opinions on what makes a UI great, making sound usability calls, and validating them with users.
- Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools (Claude, Cursor, or equivalent) as a daily driver — with judgment about when to lean on them and when to override them.
- Git proficiency and collaborative dev habits (peer reviews, readable self-documenting code).
- Excellent written and verbal communication — including the ability to articulate UX trade-offs to engineers, customers, and leadership.
- Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Design, or a related field.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with tRPC or similar end-to-end-typed RPC stacks.
- Comfortable touching backend services to tune endpoints, shape payloads, and improve the frontend experience.
- Experience building WebGL applications (Three.js, Pixi.js, or equivalent).
- Familiarity with TanStack (Query, Router, and/or Table) and MUI (or equivalent frontend framework).
- Background in technical visualizations — graphs, schematics, scientific charts, or engineering data.
- Familiarity with electronics, EDA tooling, or other complex technical domains.
- Startup experience.
- Based in Montreal or the GTA.
Personal Qualities
- High-ownership senior IC. You treat Cadstrom's outcome as your own and pick up the work that no one else owns yet.
- Hands-on by default. You stay close to the code and ship as your primary mode. With AI-assisted development, you reach for the keyboard rather than the org chart.
- Highly opinionated about UX. You have informed, well-formed views on what makes a UI excellent and pleasurable to use, and you bring those views to every feature. You test, iterate, and ship — pulling in a designer when your own knowledge runs out.
- Craft-obsessed. Typography, hierarchy, motion, empty states, error states — the details that separate a functional UI from one that's genuinely pleasurable to use. You sweat them.
- Pragmatic over perfect. You ship the right amount of polish for where the company is now, not where it might be in five years.
- Clear communicator. You convey UX and engineering trade-offs clearly, in writing and in person.
- Embraces the ethos of "We, not I."
Why you'll love working with us
- Early Stage Equity Package – We want owners, not employees. You'll receive meaningful early-stage equity in a high-growth company, because we want you to share in what we build.
- Impact – You'll have the chance to make a significant impact not only for our customers, but on how the industry as a whole approaches test and validation.
- Care – we believe strongly in caring for each other. We encourage our people to bring their whole selves to work, support each other, and ensure they are happy in and out of the workplace.
- Leading benefits - we invest deeply in the health and wellbeing of our team with leading startup benefits, 0% copay across the board, and a $2k/year HSA.
- World-Class Backers – Cadstrom is backed by world-class investors: Bison Ventures (Bill Gates), Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt), and the Allen Institute for AI (Paul Allen).
All are Welcome.
We are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive environment. We are actively working to create an environment of mutual respect where equal opportunities are available to all employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We believe that diversity and inclusion among our founders and employees are critical to the success of our company.