Senior Front-End Product Engineer (React/Next) — Own the UX of a Live SaaS
Project description
We run a live web platform used daily by dental clinics to manage their front desk — capturing leads, booking consults, and handling patient records. The engineering underneath is solid; what it needs now is a front-end that feels effortless. That is your job.
This is a taste role, not an hours role. We are looking for a US-based senior product engineer who knows what an American professional user expects, has genuine UX judgment, and can ship high-quality interfaces fast using modern AI tooling. You will own the entire look and feel of the product as we scale toward a multi-clinic US rollout.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
- The full front-end / UX layer: information architecture, layout, hierarchy, scannability, component consistency, and interaction.
- Making the complex feel simple — a busy staffer should open the app and instantly know what to do next. Benchmark against the leading commercial platforms and beat them on usability.
- Shipping fast with AI tooling (Cursor / Claude / v0 / Copilot) without leaving behind unmaintainable code.
- A clean handoff with the backend team: you consume typed data and server actions; you never touch the database directly.
- Iterating on a live product against real user feedback, week over week.
THE STACK (matters for fit) Next.js App Router (monorepo, pnpm) on Vercel, TypeScript (strict), Tailwind + shadcn/ui, React server and client components, server actions, Clerk auth, Drizzle/Postgres behind a typed service layer. You own the UI/presentation layer; an offshore team owns the data, services, and integrations. The front/back boundary is already clean and type-enforced.
MUST-HAVES
- US-based, senior, with a portfolio of genuinely intuitive product UI (SaaS / dashboards / internal tools — not marketing sites).
- Strong Next.js App Router specifically — server vs client components, server actions, working inside a TypeScript monorepo. This is NOT a classic React SPA + REST role.
- Strong TypeScript and Tailwind (shadcn/ui a plus); ships production-grade, maintainable code.
- Real product/UX taste — you can take something clunky and make it feel effortless, and explain why it is better.
- Fluent with AI-assisted development and a point of view on using it well (speed without slop).
- Native US-user sensibility and self-direction — you can own a lane with light oversight.
NICE-TO-HAVES
- Healthcare / practice-management / booking / scheduling / HIPAA-aware experience.
- Design-system / component-library discipline; Figma-to-code fluency.
- Startup / 0-to-1 speed.
ENGAGEMENT Ongoing, long-term contract. Part-time and capped hours (roughly 15–25 hrs/week to start) with a minimum weekly commitment so availability is reliable. We are deliberately trading fewer hours of a strong senior engineer for taste and speed.
TO APPLY, PLEASE ANSWER 1. Link 1–2 products where you owned the front-end/UX. Point to something you made dramatically more intuitive and explain the thinking. 2. How do you use AI coding tools in your workflow, and how do you keep AI-generated UI maintainable at scale? 3. Describe a before/after where you took something complex and made it feel simple. 4. Your US timezone, weekly availability, and hourly rate.