Why Vizcom
Vizcom turns generative AI into a daily tool for industrial and product designers. Sketches and references become dozens of real variations in seconds—inside a collaborative browser app used by enterprise design teams in footwear, automotive, consumer electronics, and more.
We’re well-funded (Series B), growing double-digits MoM, and expanding the core engineering team in SF. The surface area is big: realtime collaboration, GPU inference at scale, a modern TypeScript stack, and enterprise-grade reliability/security.
The Role
Own the technical direction of a product that blends heavy frontend UX with serious backend/infrastructure. You’ll raise the engineering bar through design reviews, hands-on prototyping, and pragmatic standards—while mentoring engineers into future tech leads.
What You’ll Do
- Set the architecture roadmap to keep Vizcom reliable, scalable, and a joy to develop in as usage, models, and data grow.
- Ship hands-on: jump into code for critical paths, rapid prototypes, and hairy debugging (latency, memory, race conditions, WebGL/WASM quirks).
- Install quality guardrails that scale: test strategy, code-review norms, perf budgets, observability baselines.
- Mentor and multiply: develop senior engineers into tech leads; model clear written design and crisp decision-making.
- Partner cross-functionally: represent engineering trade-offs with Product/Design/Go-To-Market; act as the CTO’s delegate when needed.
90-Day Outcomes
- Reliability & perf: land an observability-driven plan for our top-5 critical flows; reduce p95 for at least one user-visible flow by ~30% through targeted fixes (query plans, caching, batching, streaming, GPU/CPU boundaries).
- Architecture: author one substantial RFC (e.g., realtime doc model, rendering pipeline boundaries, or background job topology) and lead it to adoption.
- Team health: mentor two engineers with measurable growth (scope, design quality, or incident handling).
- Developer experience: remove one persistent friction (local env speed, CI flakiness, or flaky e2e surface) and document the standard.
The Problems You’ll Tackle
- High-fanout realtime collaboration (WebSockets/CRDT-style data models).
- GPU-backed image generation pipelines and queueing with bursty workloads.
- Performance across the stack: React/Vite bundles, GraphQL n+1s, Postgres query plans, caching at the right layer.
- Enterprise-grade SSO/SAML/SCIM, auditability, and secure multi-tenant boundaries.
- A design-forward UX that must still feel instant under load.
Our Stack (today)
- Frontend: TypeScript, React, Vite, WebGL; realtime collaboration.
- API/Backend: TypeScript/Node, GraphQL (PostGraphile), Postgres, Redis, background workers.
- Infra: Kubernetes, Pulumi, CI/CD with GitHub Actions, Datadog for observability, feature flags.
- Security/Enterprise: SSO/SAML (WorkOS), SOC 2-minded practices.
Experience with every item isn’t required—you should be excited to shape it.
What Great Looks Like
- You’ve led systems at scale in TS/Node (or similar) and know where complexity should live (and shouldn’t).
- You’re equally comfortable writing code and writing RFCs—and your reviews make everyone better.
- You communicate precisely (written first), make trade-offs explicit, and keep momentum without hand-waving.
- You lead through influence, not title; people invite you to reviews because you raise the conversation.
Qualifications
- 8–12+ years building distributed web systems (TypeScript/Node preferred) with 2+ years at Staff scope.
- Depth with Postgres and performance/observability (profiling, traces, query tuning).
- Experience with container orchestration and production ops (K8s or equivalent).
- Bonus: realtime collaboration models, WebGL/WASM, GPU workloads, or enterprise identity (SSO/SAML/SCIM).
How We Work
- Small team, high ownership. Fewer people, more leverage.
- Design-centric. We obsess over speed and feel; “fast enough” usually isn’t.
- Write it down. RFCs, crisp decisions, living docs.
- Operate what you build. Everyone on call support; incidents drive improvement, not blame.
Compensation & Benefits
We pay top-of-market for Staff/Principal talent in SF and include meaningful equity. Full benefits and the gear you need to do the best work of your career.
Interview Process (fast; no leetcode)
- Intro (30m): mutual fit, role/impact.
- Architectural deep-dive (60–75m): a real Vizcom problem; you drive the trade-offs.
- Hands-on working session (90m): pair on a small, realistic slice.
- Cross-functional chat (30m): product/design collaboration.
- Founder/CTO conversation (30–45m): values, scope, expectations.
- References & offer.
Ready to build?
If you want your work to be used daily by world-class designers—and you like owning problems end-to-end—let’s talk. Apply with links (GitHub, LinkedIn, notable projects) and a short note on something hard you shipped.