Software Engineer: Frontend

Generalist; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Generalist is seeking a Frontend Engineer to build the interfaces that enable researchers, operators, and customers to interact with our robotics foundation models. You’ll own frontend development from early prototypes to production applications, working closely with design, product, and infrastructure teams.

This role combines strong engineering fundamentals with thoughtful product judgement: you should care as much about how an interface feels as how it is built.

Qualifications

• Production web apps with TypeScript and React.
• Clear component boundaries and explicit application state.
• Experience collaborating with engineering, design, and product.
• Experience managing asynchronous data and user interactions.

Responsibilities

• Build web applications for robot monitoring, data exploration, model training and evaluation, and internal tooling.
• Turn complex technical requirements into clear, responsive interfaces that help users make decisions and take action.
• Develop interactive visualizations for robot telemetry, video, experiment results, and system health.
• Shape frontend architecture that makes complex workflows easy to understand, test, and extend as the product grows.
• Establish a cohesive design system across our research platform and robot operator interfaces, with shared components, styles, and interaction patterns.
• Work directly with researchers, operators, and customers to understand their workflows, test ideas, and improve the product based on feedback.
• Improve the frontend development experience through clear conventions, reusable patterns, and tooling that helps engineers build consistent features quickly.

Skills

TypeScript

React

Frontend tooling

Component libraries

Asynchronous data handling

Team collaboration

Job description

About Generalist

At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. We believe the industries and homes of the future will depend on humans and machines working together in new ways. Robots can help us build more and get more done.

We build embodied foundation models, starting with a focus on dexterity. This requires advancing the frontiers of data, models, and hardware, to enable robots to intelligently interact with the physical world.

The company embraces both large-scale AI and robotics as core to its DNA. Our team of researchers, roboticists, and company builders come from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, and other frontier labs—with a track record of shipping AI breakthroughs. Before Generalist, we pioneered large embodied multimodal models and vision-language-action models (PaLM-E, RT-2, Gemini Robotics), launched and scaled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots (Atlas, Spot, Stretch) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from parkour to manipulation, and testing robustness).

We’re an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

We’re looking for a Frontend Engineer to build the interfaces that make advanced robotics intuitive and useful. Your work will help researchers understand model behavior, operators manage robot fleets, and customers build with our foundation model.
You’ll own frontend development from early prototypes to production applications, working closely with design, product, and infrastructure teams. This role combines strong engineering fundamentals with thoughtful product judgement: you should care as much about how an interface feels as how it is built.

What You’ll Do

• Build web applications for robot monitoring, data exploration, model training and evaluation, and internal tooling.
• Turn complex technical requirements into clear, responsive interfaces that help users make decisions and take action.
• Develop interactive visualizations for robot telemetry, video, experiment results, and system health.
• Shape frontend architecture that makes complex workflows easy to understand, test, and extend as the product grows.
• Establish a cohesive design system across our research platform and robot operator interfaces, with shared components, styles, and interaction patterns.
• Work directly with researchers, operators, and customers to understand their workflows, test ideas, and improve the product based on feedback.
• Improve the frontend development experience through clear conventions, reusable patterns, and tooling that helps engineers build consistent features quickly.

What You’ll Bring

• Experience shipping and maintaining production web applications using TypeScript, React, and modern frontend tooling.
• Strong opinions around shared component libraries and UI patterns with good judgment about what to standardize and where flexibility matters.
• Strong frontend architecture fundamentals: clear component boundaries, explicit application state, and an ability to simplify complex code and make it easier for others to extend.
• Experience managing asynchronous data and user interactions, including keeping interfaces accurate and usable during background updates, slow requests, and failures.
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach to working across engineering, design, and product.

Nice to Have

• Experience building tools for robotics, AI, scientific computing, or other technically complex domains.
• Experience with real-time interfaces, streaming data, or event-driven systems.
• Experience keeping data-intensive interfaces fast, including large tables or interactive visualizations and videos.
• Experience consolidating UI patterns and incrementally modernizing an existing frontend while continuing to ship product improvements.
• Excitement around developing frontend developer tooling, such as component previews or advanced useful end to end or browser tests.
• Experience with browser performance profiling, frontend observability, and automated testing.