Posted October 19, 2026 Staff Front-End Engineer, Creative Tools HILOS Portland, Oregon, USA Full Time Developer Engineering

UI/UX HILOS

builds the bridge between idea and object. Where imagination meets materiality. Built for designers who move between ambition and responsibility, precision and feel. We're building the world's most intelligent design software for product designers to go from idea to reality. Our product, GHOST , takes footwear designers from first sketch to production-ready 3D on one canvas, with an AI apprentice that learns their taste. We automate drudgery, never mastery, for the people who make culture. Role Overview We're looking for a Staff Front-End Engineer to be the technical owner of the GHOST front end: a professional creative tool running in the browser, on Mac and Windows desktops, and on iPad with Apple Pencil. This is a senior, hands-on architecture role. You've shipped production systems at scale, and you know where front ends break: the frame budget, GPU drivers, Safari's memory ceiling, the gap between a trackpad and a mouse wheel, the difference between a Pencil stroke and a finger. You'll set the front-end architecture, make GHOST fast and dependable on every device our designers use, and write a lot of the code yourself. You're more than a front-end specialist. You have real product and UX judgment. You'll shape how features should work, not just how they're built, and partner closely with our designers. When a feature needs an API change, a schema change, or a new service, you'll build that too.

Responsibilities Front-End Architecture:

Own and evolve the architecture of a large React + TypeScript app (Vite, TanStack Router/Query, Zustand, Tailwind, shadcn/Radix) Design state, data-flow, rendering, and caching patterns that scale with an infinite canvas, 2D/3D studios, real-time collaboration, and streaming AI generation Set standards, review designs and code, and make the calls that keep a small team fast and safe

Performance:

Own performance end to end: frame time, input latency, memory, bundle size, load time, and time-to-interactive on large projects Profile and fix across the stack: React rendering, main-thread work, Web Workers, OffscreenCanvas, GPU upload, asset streaming, and compression (e.g. meshoptimizer/Draco) Set performance budgets and monitoring so regressions are caught before users feel them

Graphics & Interactive Surfaces:

Lead the 3D and canvas layers built on three.js / React Three Fiber and WebGL, with a view on WebGPU Handle GPU and driver variation: Apple Silicon vs. integrated and discrete Windows GPUs, ANGLE/D3D vs. Metal back ends, context loss, precision and shader quirks, and high-DPI rendering Build sketching and editing that feel right: pressure, tilt, coalesced and predicted pointer events, and palm rejection

Cross-Device & Cross-Platform:

Make GHOST excellent on tablet and desktop. Design for touch vs. hover, Pencil vs. mouse, trackpad pinch vs. wheel zoom, and Cmd vs. Ctrl conventions on Mac vs. PC Own browser and runtime differences: Safari/WebKit (including iPad memory limits and WKWebView in our Capacitor iOS app), Chrome, Edge, and PWA behavior Build and maintain a device/browser/GPU test matrix and the tooling that keeps it honest

Product Design & UX:

Shape features from the problem up: define flows and interaction models with design, prototype in code, and test with real designers Bring a craftsperson's eye to motion, states, latency perception, and the details that make a creative tool feel professional Evolve the design system and Storybook component library with our designers

Full Stack:

Build across the boundary with our Django/Python backend, Postgres, and typed OpenAPI contracts Design the APIs, sync, and offline/local-storage (IndexedDB) strategy the UI needs, and partner with ML on generation pipelines and streaming

Quality, Reliability & Leadership:

Raise the testing and observability bar (Vitest, Playwright, Chromatic, Sentry, PostHog) Mentor engineers, write the docs that let the team move on their own, and make pragmatic build-vs-buy calls under startup constraints Qualifications 8+ years building production software, with deep front-end expertise and a track record of leading front-end architecture on products shipped at scale Expert React and TypeScript, with a deep understanding of the browser rendering pipeline, the event loop, memory, and performance profiling Hands-on WebGL experience (three.js, React Three Fiber, or raw WebGL) and comfort debugging GPU, shader, and driver-specific issues Proven experience shipping across device classes: tablet and desktop, touch and pen and mouse, macOS and Windows, Safari and Chromium, including the quirks of each Built complex, highly interactive applications: editors, canvases, design or CAD tools, visualization, or real-time collaborative apps Real product and UX judgment, shown in shipped work where you influenced what was built, not just how Full-stack competence: designing APIs and data models and shipping backend changes in production (Python/Django a plus) You still write a lot of code, and you lead through technical clarity, written rationale, and mentorship Nice to Have Creative or professional tools at scale (e.g. Figma, Canva, Adobe, Procreate, Framer, Miro, Onshape, Autodesk, Unity) or graphics-heavy consumer products WebGPU, WebAssembly, compute shaders, or computational geometry Real-time collaboration and CRDTs (Liveblocks, Yjs, Automerge) iOS, Capacitor, or native-web hybrid apps; Apple Pencil and stylus input Design-system leadership; comfort designing in Figma or straight in code AI product experience: streaming generation, agent UIs, human-in-the-loop interfaces Interest in footwear, fashion, industrial design, or making physical things What We Offer Technical ownership of the front end of a professional creative tool, with hard and visible problems in graphics, performance, and UX Work next to footwear designers, ML engineers, and the people who use what you build Creative, collaborative environment at the intersection of design and technology Fast-paced startup with significant ownership and impact Competitive compensation and equity Based in Portland's creative Old Town district Reports to: CEO Apply to this Job Apply to this Job