Principal Engineer ( Frontend)

About Neo

AI is the most significant shift in how work gets done since the advent of the Internet — yet most organizations fail to capture its value. Neo is changing that.

Founded by Bhavin Turakhia— Co-Founder of Zeta, Radix, and Titan — Neo is building an integrated, AI-first suite of products that capture work, centralize context, and make AI a first-class participant in every workflow:

Tasket — A radically reimagined, AI-native work management platform that centralizes context and makes AI delegation seamless for all work.

Friday — AI Assistant, co-worker and agent platform, pre-integrated into Tasket, Studio, Drive and 1000+ SaaS platforms.

Studio — AI-native suite for co-creating docs, spreadsheets and diagrams collaboratively with humans and agents.

Drive — AI-native repository, where humans and agents can co-work on files.

Scribe — AI assistant for meetings that goes beyond note-taking and actually does your work while on the call.

About the role

As a Principal Client-Side Engineer, you will own the client experience across the Neo suite end to end — product UI, component architecture, the design system, and client performance — and raise the bar for the engineers around you.

Neo is a complex, real-time, collaborative product. The client isn't a thin skin over an API — it's where the work is felt, where context surfaces, and where execution either clicks or doesn't. That makes client-side engineering one of the highest-leverage disciplines on the team.

We are proponents of leveraging best-in-breed AI tools at every step of the engineering lifecycle — design, development, review, and testing. This requires a different engineering mindset: a lean team of senior, hands-on, AI-adept engineers, resulting in ultra-rapid iteration cycles and fast output. You will own and oversee this approach for the client, from design through to production.

Today the client means web; as Neo expands to additional platforms, you'll help shape those surfaces too. You'll also contribute to the backend — API design and how Neo works under the hood. AI fluency is a core engineering competency here, not a nice-to-have.

Responsibilities

Client craft & experience

• Translate designs into production UI with precision — typography, spacing, motion, and interaction states.
• Own client performance: rendering, bundle size, load times, and interaction responsiveness; find and fix bottlenecks before users feel them.
• Build interfaces that handle live data, optimistic updates, and multi-user state cleanly.

Architecture & design system

• Own the component architecture and design system — tokens, patterns, and component APIs that keep the product consistent as it scales without becoming a maintenance burden.
• Integrate cleanly with REST/GraphQL APIs, and contribute to the backend and API design where it keeps the client fast and reliable.
• Make the calls on client architecture and own the trade-offs behind them.

Execution & delivery

• Drive delivery through an AI-first workflow: write the spec, run coding agents to implement, steer them, and verify the result against the craft and performance bar before it ships.
• Own verification — decide what correct and good enough mean for the client experience, and hold that line.

AI-first SDLC harness

• Build and improve the harness the front-end team builds with — specs, reusable skills, evals, and guardrails that let agents produce reliable, on-standard UI.
• Know where AI helps and where it needs supervision, and encode that into how the team works.

Mentoring & raising the bar

• Set and promote the standards the front-end codebase is held to, and mentor engineers through reviews and design discussions.
• Spread good agent practice so the whole team's leverage compounds, not just your own.

Product thinking

• Work directly with product and design to shape features, not just execute them — push back when something won't work, and propose better alternatives.
• Own outcomes, not tickets.

Skills

• AI-native engineering practice — Actively uses LLM-based tooling (Cursor, Claude, Copilot) across the full lifecycle and knows where AI helps and where it needs supervision; builds the specs, skills, evals, and guardrails that make agent-generated UI reliable.
• JavaScript / TypeScript — Strong command of modern JS/TS; clean, typed, maintainable code and a high bar for the codebase.
• Modern frameworks — Expertise in React, Vue, or Angular and advanced concepts: state management (Redux / Zustand / Jotai), SSR/SSG, and performance optimisation.
• HTML & CSS craft — Expert-level HTML and CSS; treats typography, spacing, colour, and motion as engineering problems, not decoration.
• Client performance engineering — Profiling, bundle optimisation, lazy loading, memoisation, and rendering-pipeline analysis.
• Design sensibility — Can read a Figma file, spot inconsistencies, and improve a design without being told. Strong aesthetic judgment.
• Real-time systems — Building client interfaces over WebSockets or SSE; optimistic UI patterns and handling eventual consistency on the client.
• Backend & APIs — Solid understanding of REST/GraphQL API design, microservices, and distributed systems.
• Databases & infrastructure — SQL/NoSQL (PostgreSQL, MongoDB), caching strategies, and cloud platforms (AWS / GCP / Azure). Familiarity with SQLite as a client-side database is a plus.

Experience & Qualifications

• 8+ years of client-side engineering, with a strong track record of shipping production-grade web products.
• A portfolio of shipped products that demonstrates both technical depth and design craft.
• AI-native development experience strongly preferred — portfolio, open source, or work samples welcome.
• Experience in a product-led, fast-moving engineering environment is a strong plus.
• Full-stack experience — frontend (preferably React) plus backend (Java, databases) — is a good-to-have.
• Engineering degree in computer science or equivalent.

Equal Opportunity

Neo is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds, cultures, and communities to apply and believe that a diverse workforce is key to our success.