- Senior
- Office in San Francisco
Why Vizcom
Vizcom turns generative AI into a daily tool for industrial and product designers. Sketches and references become dozens of real variations in seconds—inside a collaborative browser app used by enterprise design teams in footwear, automotive, consumer electronics, and more.
We’re well-funded (Series B), growing double-digits MoM, and expanding the core engineering team in SF. The surface area is big: realtime collaboration, GPU inference at scale, a modern TypeScript stack, and enterprise-grade reliability/security.
The Role
Own the technical direction of a product that blends heavy frontend UX with serious backend/infrastructure. You’ll raise the engineering bar through design reviews, hands-on prototyping, and pragmatic standards—while mentoring engineers into future tech leads.
What You’ll Do
Set the architecture roadmap to keep Vizcom reliable, scalable, and a joy to develop in as usage, models, and data grow.
Ship hands-on: jump into code for critical paths, rapid prototypes, and hairy debugging (latency, memory, race conditions, WebGL/WASM quirks).
Install quality guardrails that scale: test strategy, code-review norms, perf budgets, observability baselines.
Mentor and multiply: develop senior engineers into tech leads; model clear written design and crisp decision-making.
Partner cross-functionally: represent engineering trade-offs with Product/Design/Go-To-Market; act as the CTO’s delegate when needed.
90-Day Outcomes
Reliability & perf: land an observability-driven plan for our top-5 critical flows; reduce p95 for at least one user-visible flow by ~30% through targeted fixes (query plans, caching, batching, streaming, GPU/CPU boundaries).
Architecture: author one substantial RFC (e.g., realtime doc model, rendering pipeline boundaries, or background job topology) and lead it to adoption.
Team health: mentor two engineers with measurable growth (scope, design quality, or incident handling).
Developer experience: remove one persistent friction (local env speed, CI flakiness, or flaky e2e surface) and document the standard.
The Problems You’ll Tackle
High-fanout realtime collaboration (WebSockets/CRDT-style data models).
GPU-backed image generation pipelines and queueing with bursty workloads.
Performance across the stack: React/Vite bundles, GraphQL n+1s, Postgres query plans, caching at the right layer.
Enterprise-grade SSO/SAML/SCIM, auditability, and secure multi-tenant boundaries.
A design-forward UX that must still feel instant under load.
Our Stack (today)
Frontend: TypeScript, React, Vite, WebGL; realtime collaboration.
API/Backend: TypeScript/Node, GraphQL (PostGraphile), Postgres, Redis, background workers.
Infra: Kubernetes, Pulumi, CI/CD with GitHub Actions, Datadog for observability, feature flags.
Security/Enterprise: SSO/SAML (WorkOS), SOC 2-minded practices.
Experience with every item isn’t required—you should be excited to shape it.
What Great Looks Like
You’ve led systems at scale in TS/Node (or similar) and know where complexity should live (and shouldn’t).
You’re equally comfortable writing code and writing RFCs—and your reviews make everyone better.
You communicate precisely (written first), make trade-offs explicit, and keep momentum without hand-waving.
You lead through influence, not title; people invite you to reviews because you raise the conversation.
Qualifications
8–12+ years building distributed web systems (TypeScript/Node preferred) with 2+ years at Staff scope.
Depth with Postgres and performance/observability (profiling, traces, query tuning).
Experience with container orchestration and production ops (K8s or equivalent).
Bonus: realtime collaboration models, WebGL/WASM, GPU workloads, or enterprise identity (SSO/SAML/SCIM).
How We Work
Small team, high ownership. Fewer people, more leverage.
Design-centric. We obsess over speed and feel; “fast enough” usually isn’t.
Write it down. RFCs, crisp decisions, living docs.
Operate what you build. Everyone on call support; incidents drive improvement, not blame.
Compensation & Benefits
We pay top-of-market for Staff/Principal talent in SF and include meaningful equity. Full benefits and the gear you need to do the best work of your career.
Interview Process (fast; no leetcode)
Intro (30m): mutual fit, role/impact.
Architectural deep-dive (60–75m): a real Vizcom problem; you drive the trade-offs.
Hands-on working session (90m): pair on a small, realistic slice.
Cross-functional chat (30m): product/design collaboration.
Founder/CTO conversation (30–45m): values, scope, expectations.
References & offer.
Ready to build?
If you want your work to be used daily by world-class designers—and you like owning problems end-to-end—let’s talk. Apply with links (GitHub, LinkedIn, notable projects) and a short note on something hard you shipped.
Apply Now
