Founding Frontend Engineer

Remote | Full-time | Pre-seed startup

About our client:

Cooks Atlas is on a mission to make home cooking more fun and navigable.

They are building a community-powered culinary platform that works like a good kitchen: focused, personalized to each user's tastes, and always evolving—without the clutter of legacy recipe sites.

The pilot experience launches this summer with in-person activations in Austin, TX. It will support farmer's market-goers in discovering what they can cook with local produce—and light a spark that they hope will grow into a movement in kitchens everywhere.

They believe preparing meals at home is more than a life skill—it's a source of joy, creativity, and connection. Cooks Atlas is designed to empower everyday cooks and creators to connect, celebrate diverse food cultures, and engage more deeply in home cooking.

About the role:

As the first dedicated frontend engineer, this person will be essential in crafting the user experiences that bring the vision to life. They will work directly with the co-founders—including a developer, food creator, and product manager—to build intuitive, delightful interfaces that solve real problems for home cooks and food creators.

You'll collaborate with the team to:

• Design & Build: Transform user needs into elegant, responsive interfaces using React, React Native Web, and TypeScript. Help shape the design system and component library from the ground up.
• Solve Real Problems: Eliminate the frustrations of current recipe sites—endless scrolling past ads, inflexible serving sizes, poor dietary customization. Every feature built will make cooking more accessible and enjoyable.
• Empower Creators: Build tools that let food creators share dynamic, personalized recipes that adapt to each user's needs, dietary restrictions, and preferences.
• Collaborate & Grow: Work closely with the product and design teams to iterate quickly. Mentor junior developers and contribute to a collaborative engineering culture.

What You Will Bring:

• User-Centered Mindset: A deep care for creating experiences that genuinely help people. An understanding that great UX comes from solving real problems, not adding flashy features.
• Frontend Expertise: 3-5 years of experience building modern web applications with React and TypeScript. Writes clean, maintainable code and understands the importance of performance and accessibility.
• Collaborative Spirit: Thrives in small teams where everyone's input matters. Comfortable giving and receiving feedback and enjoys helping others grow their skills.
• Growth Mindset: Excited to learn, experiment, and adapt. Sees challenges as opportunities to build something better.
• Integrity & Advocacy: An advocate for users and believes technology should enhance people's lives, not exploit them. Interested in ethical development practices and thoughtful AI integration.

Technical Skills:

• Must have: React Native and TypeScript experience, understanding of cross-platform development patterns, experience with modern build tools and development workflows
• High value: React Native (mobile), NextJS, integrating with WASM components, CSS-in-JS solutions, performance optimization for web and mobile
• Additional Positives: Experience with Rust or WASM integration, GraphQL, accessibility best practices, working with design systems, internationalization/localization

What You'll Love About Cooks Atlas:

• Mission-Driven Impact: Help transform how people connect with food and cooking. Build something that genuinely makes daily life better for millions of home cooks.
• Creative Problem-Solving: Tackle unique UX challenges like dynamic recipe scaling, dietary customization, and creator tools that don't exist anywhere else.
• The Team: Work with a small, passionate team that values each person's ideas and creativity. Contributions will have direct impact on product direction and company success.
• Technical Growth: Work with modern technologies while building something meaningful. Opportunity to shape frontend architecture and practices from the beginning.
• User Connection: Unlike many B2B tools, this person will build experiences that people use in their daily lives, creating moments of joy and discovery in their kitchens.

What They Offer:

• $10k / month + significant equity
• W9 contractor position
• Opportunity to grow into a technical leadership role as the company scales
• Direct collaboration with founders and significant input on product decisions

Ready to help revolutionize home cooking? They are looking for someone who shares their passion for making technology that truly serves people's needs. If excited about building elegant solutions to real problems and wanting to be part of something meaningful from the ground up, they would love to hear from you.