Frontend Engineer New York City

Meetkay; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

In-person NYC product/design

Remote roles for engineers

Job summary

YakLabs is hiring a frontend-focused engineer to architect and build the UI that powers a desktop AI application. You’ll craft the data flow, architecture, and a generative UI runtime that adapts as agents and users interact.

You will own performance on low-spec hardware, implement OAuth and onboarding flows, and shape the evolution of the product’s frontend as it scales with the team.

Qualifications

• Deep frontend fundamentals beyond basic React usage.
• You care about performance as a craft and have optimized real applications.
• You think in abstractions and build resilient interfaces.

Responsibilities

• Build the frontend architecture from scratch: component structure, state management, data flow across process boundaries.
• Implement the chat experience: streaming, tool calls, multi-turn conversations, real-time feedback.
• Build the frontend integration layer: OAuth flows, credential management, connection status, one-click setup.

Skills

Frontend fundamentals

Performance optimization

Abstraction design

Tools

React

Fluent debugging tools

Job description

YakLabs is building a desktop AI application that turns knowledge workers into AI power users, without docs, API keys, or knowing what to ask for. One surface for agentic AI work: proactive, personalized, progressively powerful. The gap between AI power users and everyone else isn’t talent, it’s setup. We close it.

The team: Alex Goddijn spent four years at Palantir, then founded an agent harness company that was acquired by Poolside AI. Seb Goddijn led internal AI at Ramp. We’re building Kay so that kind of leverage isn’t limited to companies with their own internal AI team.

We have funding. Product and design work in person in New York City, and some engineering roles are remote. Small team, high intensity, no passengers.

The job

You build the systems behind the UI: architecture, data flow, and the generative UI engine that makes the product feel alive. The interface isn’t static: it adapts, extends, and rebuilds itself based on what agents are doing and what the user needs. That engine is yours to build.

Problems you’ll work on

These are examples, not lanes. You will move between them, while taking real ownership of the ones that match your interests.

• Software people can make their own: Most tools ask people to adapt to whatever interface the vendor ships. How do we let someone shape the software they use every day around their own work, without asking them to become a frontend engineer or fork the product?
• An interface as an extensible runtime: Users, agents, and plugins need to add new surfaces, interactions, and workflows inside Kay. What primitives and APIs let them build freely while keeping the result coherent, accessible, safe, and native to the product?
• Performance without closing the system: A customizable desktop app can run for days while plugins, panes, sessions, and live data accumulate. How do we keep it fast and robust on ordinary hardware without limiting what people can build?

What you’ll do

• Build the frontend architecture from scratch: component structure, state management, data flow across process boundaries.
• Build the generative UI engine: surfaces that render dynamically from agent output, plugin-defined panels, and user-customizable layouts. The UI is a runtime, not a set of hardcoded screens.
• Implement the chat experience: streaming, tool calls, multi-turn conversations, real-time feedback.
• Own performance on low-spec hardware. The product has to be snappy on an 8 GB corporate laptop. Measure, profile, and fix continuously.
• Build the integration layer on the frontend: OAuth flows, credential management, connection status, one-click setup experiences.
• Build the abstractions that let the product evolve. Today’s architecture has to support tomorrow’s. You’ll set that discipline.

Who you are

• Deep frontend fundamentals. Not “I’ve used React”: you understand rendering models, know how to debug from a flame graph, and have opinions about state management earned the hard way.
• You care about performance as a craft. You’ve profiled and optimized real applications, not just added lazy loading.
• You think in abstractions. You build interfaces that can survive the thing behind them changing completely.

Bonus

• You’ve shipped desktop apps to corporate or enterprise environments.
• You’ve worked cross-platform, on macOS and Windows.
• You’ve shipped PRs to open-source agentic harness projects.

Who we look for

These apply to every role at YakLabs.

• First principles thinking. We’re building in a category that’s being defined in real time. Best practices don’t exist yet. You reason from the problem, not from what everyone else is doing.
• High agency and ownership. You don’t wait to be told what to do. You see what needs to happen, you go make it happen, and you own the outcome. At a team this size, there’s nobody to delegate to.
• Deep curiosity about AI tooling. Not just using ChatGPT or Copilot: you’re experimenting, writing your own tools, trying new agent frameworks the week they drop, forming opinions about what works and what doesn’t. The people building this product should be the most demanding users of the category.
• You build compounding leverage. In the era of building with agents, one person doesn’t just ship one person’s work, they build the systems that build the product. Every person is amplified, and with that amplification comes the responsibility to build things that compound: skills, automations, agent workflows that make the next thing faster. This is a new way of working, and you’re excited to develop the skillset it demands.

The deal

• Early team, meaningful equity.
• In person in New York City for product and design roles. Some engineering roles are remote, and each posting lists its location.
• You’ll shape the product, the culture, and the company. This is a founding-team role.

How we hire

YakLabs is an equal opportunity employer. We consider every application withoutregard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation,national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protectedcharacteristic. If you need an accommodation at any point in the process, email [e-mail] and we will work it out with you. A person, not a machine,reads every application.

We use what you send us only to consider your application. We keep applications for two years and then delete them, and we never add you to a mailing list. To ask for a copy of what we hold about you, or to ask us to delete it, email [e-mail] . More in our privacy policy .