Senior/Staff Frontend Engineer

About Us

Queue builds robots to fill prescriptions. Our machine is designed to take stock bottles of medication and produce counted, labeled vials, so that pharmacists and technicians can spend their time on patients. Our first product is built to work behind the pharmacy counter and to be operated by pharmacy staff.

About the Role

You own the screen that pharmacy staff will use to run the machine, and then every other screen Queue ships. The operator screen is a large, touch-only panel on the front of the unit, built to be used all day by technicians who are busy with something else. You are answerable for three things: the screen that ships is the screen that was reviewed, a change in the design reaches the machine in days, and the next screen is built to the frontend standard you keep.

This posting covers Senior and Staff levels. Senior level means you own this surface end to end. Staff level means the frontend standard and review practice carry your name, and other engineers build against them. The technical interview is set at the Senior bar.

What You'll Own

• The operator screen — Its scope is the prescription queue, replenishment of drugs and consumables, machine health, administration and exception handling, and sign-in on an on-screen keypad.

• The prototype and the application — The interface has two forms: the design prototype that is reviewed, and the React application for the machine. You are answerable for the match between them, working with our product designer.

• The rules of touch — There is no mouse and no keyboard. Touch targets are never smaller than 48 pixels. Text can be read at a glance in the middle of another task. The screen advances on physical events, such as a drawer closing, and not on extra taps. An action that cannot be undone is never placed where fast fingers land.

• What interrupts a technician — A model with three layers: ambient status, a call for attention, and a blocking dialog, with clear rules for which is used when. That includes the alerts for the machine's own faults.

• Working in the interface contract — The screen owns no domain state: it renders what the machine sends, so a reload always lands on the truth. Its TypeScript types are generated from the Rust source on the machine, and the build fails when they drift. The engineers who own the on-machine software own the contract; you work in it with them every day.

• The quality bar — You set it and hold every screen to it: unit tests with coverage measured, end-to-end tests in a real browser, and lint rules that enforce the design tokens.

• Performance and motion — The screen feels immediate under a technician's hand, animation carries meaning rather than decoration, and the whole interface stays responsive on the machine's embedded display.

• The screens that follow — Our cloud operations dashboard comes next, and then the screens of later products. They are built to the standard you set on the operator screen, on smaller displays as well as large ones.

First 90 Days

• Day 30: You have merged a change to the screen. You know the queue, replenishment and alert flows as a technician will meet them, you have sat in a design review, and you have gone through the prototype and the application side by side with our product designer.

• Day 60: Design changes reach the application through your own commits. The three-layer interruption model is yours, alerts included. Your end-to-end suite runs the flows a technician will run every day.

• Day 90: You are answerable for the match between the application and the reviewed design, and for the screen's readiness for security review. You keep the frontend standard: testing, tokens, review, and how screens work within the contract. You have a dated plan for the next screen, the cloud operations dashboard.

What We're Looking For

Must-Have

• Ownership — you have owned a product surface that people depended on every day, from the first design conversation to the fault found in the field, and you can show what you changed after it went wrong.

• Accessible by default — WCAG 2.1 AA as a floor, plus color vision, motion sensitivity, plain language, and localization for people whose first language is not English. You can describe an accessibility defect you found after release, how you found it, and what you changed.

• Strict TypeScript — the strictest compiler settings are where you are at home, and you write types that make an invalid state impossible to express.

• React 19 with the React Compiler — your components follow the Rules of React because they have to.

• State discipline — you have built over state the server owns, delivered by WebSocket, and you understand why a screen that owns no domain state is safer.

• Our tools — Tailwind 4, Vite, Vitest and Playwright, with component tests and real-browser tests as a habit.

• Work with design — you have turned a designer's living prototype into production software without losing the intent, and you can disagree with a designer and still ship.

Important

Working knowledge is enough, and we teach the rest.

• Touch interfaces on fixed devices — large targets, keypads drawn by the application, protection against a mis-tap.

• Explicit states — you reason in states and transitions, which is how the whole system is built.

We do not ask for Rust. The types are generated for you.

Nice-to-Have

• Responsive web work.

• Interfaces for embedded browsers, point-of-sale or other constrained devices.

• Healthcare or another regulated industry.

• A design system or standard that other engineers adopted.

How We Hire

• Recruiter Screen (30 min)

• Technical Interview (90 min) — a walk through your take-home exercise of 2 to 3 hours, sent at least 24 hours before, then we build on it together.

• Design Interview (60 min) — an interaction and architecture problem that changes as we go.

• Leadership Interview (60 min) — how you own your work and work across squads.

Two interviewers score each technical stage independently.

At Staff level, the Design Interview also looks for more than one option weighed, with the trade-offs written down, and for how other engineers would review the design and take it up. The Leadership Interview also looks for how you have raised a standard across teams: a practice you rolled out that stuck, engineers you helped lead, and disagreement worked through.

What We Offer

• Ownership — the operator screen end to end, then every screen that follows

• Hard problems: touch-only interaction, interruptions a busy technician can act on, and a typed contract with the software on the machine

• Small team, zero bureaucracy, high trust

Why Join Us Now?

Impact & Growth

• Direct Impact: The screen you build is the one pharmacy staff will use to run the machine

• Growth: The standard you set on this screen is the one every later screen is built to

• Why it matters: Queue exists so that medications are accessible everywhere, at any time, and so that technology makes access more equal rather than selective. An interface that only works for some people is the opposite of that, which is why accessibility is a requirement of this role rather than an extra.

Team and Culture

• Reports to the Head of Software Engineering with significant autonomy and influence

• Who You Work With: You work every day with our product designer and with the engineers who own the on-machine software

• Where We Work: Hybrid, three days a week at our headquarters in the Bay Area; the screen you build is bolted to a machine

Our Values

• Servant Leadership

• Do the Hard Things

• Own Your Work

• Default is Now

Own Your Work comes first in this role: a mis-tap on this screen is your problem before it is anyone else's.

Contact: If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]