Software Engineer: Frontend

Generalist; Somerville (NJ); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Generalist in Somerville, NJ is seeking a Frontend Engineer to build intuitive interfaces for robotics research and operator tools. You will own frontend development from prototypes to production, collaborating with design, product, and infrastructure teams.

You will ship production web apps with TypeScript and React, shape a cohesive design system, and craft responsive interfaces for telemetry, visualization, and data exploration, while keeping performance and usability in focus.

Qualifications

• Production web applications using TypeScript and React.
• Strong ownership of frontend architecture and component boundaries.
• Experience building shared component libraries and design systems.
• Ability to manage asynchronous data and maintain UI during slow requests or failures.

Responsibilities

• Build web applications for robot monitoring and data exploration.
• Create clear, responsive interfaces to help users decide actions.
• Develop interactive visualizations for telemetry and results.
• Shape frontend architecture for scalable workflows.
• Establish a cohesive design system across research platform interfaces.
• Collaborate with researchers, operators, and customers to test ideas and improve product.
• Improve frontend development experience with reusable patterns and tooling.

Skills

Frontend engineering

TypeScript

React

Shared components

UI patterns

Tools

TypeScript

React

Webpack/Vite

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 are 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 judgment: you should care as much about how an interface feels as how it is built.
What You’ll Do

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.