Front End Engineer

Pickford is building the next generation of storytelling. We're building expressive interactive narratives, while preserving storytelling's historical foundation as a tight loop between audience and creator. Our focus on story quality and audience engagement means we get to work with truly exceptional creators. Our AI expertise has attracted world-class researchers. Together we're defining a new category of media. All of this comes together in a UGC platform where creators can build, share, and collaborate on living stories which can only be powered by AI.

Position Overview:

In this role, you’ll own the user facing layer, turning complex and new paradigms into beautiful and fun user experiences. You will function as both designer and developer, ensuring our unique storytelling platform has an interface that enables users to truly love what they are watching and creators to bring their stories to life. We want you to sweat the details and flex your creativity beyond traditional design paradigms.

We value people who ask “How can we make this work?” and who enjoy building solutions that don’t have obvious blueprints. You’ll work closely with a small, multidisciplinary team of engineers and storytellers who are committed to building something genuinely new.

We’re looking for a Front End Engineer who can function as both designer and implementer, with a strong mobile-first mindset.

Key Responsibilities:

• Proactively design, build and maintain high-quality frontend features for a mobile-first web platform with real-time interactive experiences
• Translate product intent or creative goals into clear interaction models and layouts
• Own core user flows, ensuring performance, responsiveness, and state consistency
• Collaborate closely with product, backend, and ML teams to define frontend architecture
• Take initiative on identifying and fixing UX edge cases, race conditions, and state-management issues
• Contribute to frontend standards, component libraries, and design systems
• Identify UX friction and interaction breakdowns, then fix them
• Review human and AI-generated code and help uphold a high bar for frontend quality and maintainability

Skills and Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional frontend engineering experience
• Strong mobile-first design instincts
• Experience shipping mobile-heavy or mobile-first products
• Experience working with Figma as both a design and collaboration tool
• Experience with nondeterministic and long-running AI-powered interfaces
• Strong proficiency in modern JavaScript/TypeScript
• Deep experience with React (or similar component-based frameworks)
• Experience using Vite or similar modern frontend build tooling
• Excellent communicator who thrives in small, cross-functional teams
  

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with Shadecn
• Experience designing and building tools for complex user-generated content
• Experience with Python & FastAPI
• Exposure to large-scale real-time systems such as video streaming or multiplayer gaming

• Competitive salary, stock, and benefits package
• The space to work on truly crazy projects that will shape the future of media
• The opportunity to closely collaborate with with amazing multidisciplinary talent – Hollywood creatives, world-class designers, superstar engineers, and incredible AI researchers
• An environment designed to let everyone collaborate and be included no matter what speciality you previously had
• Unique professional growth opportunities built directly into our development process