Sierra · San Francisco
Software EngineeringEngineeringFullTimeposted 15mo ago
At Sierra, we’re building a platform to enable every company in the world to build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We partner with industry leaders such as SoftBank, Uber, Rivian, CLEAR, and Sutter Health. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.
We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.
Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.
Own frontend across product and marketing surfaces: You will work across both our core product interface and customer-facing web pages, ensuring a cohesive, polished user experience across all touch points. This includes building features in the web app and also collaborating on our website to keep branding and user experience consistent and high-quality.
Lead design system and UI components: You’ll design, build, and maintain a scalable design system and reusable component library that empowers all our engineers and designers. By delivering robust, high-quality UI components and infrastructure, you will ensure consistency and excellence across all product surfaces. You’ll also collaborate with designers to establish guidelines and patterns, enabling the team to rapidly build beautiful, consistent UIs with confidence.
Craft pixel-perfect user experiences: Work closely with our design team to translate Figma designs into reality with pixel-perfect precision and delightful interactions. You will partner with designers to refine UI patterns and ensure every detail is right – from typography and spacing to motion and hover states. We care deeply about design craft, so you’ll sweat the details to build an interface that feels elegant, intuitive, and “just right” for users.
Champion frontend excellence: As the senior frontend expert, you will set and uphold high standards for performance, accessibility, and code quality. You’ll optimize our frontend for speed (efficient loading, bundle size, smooth rendering) and ensure our product works flawlessly across browsers and devices. You will also incorporate best practices for accessibility and internationalization, making our product usable by all customers.
Move fast with pragmatism and quality: In our startup environment, you’ll iterate quickly to ship improvements and new features. You’ll make thoughtful engineering trade-offs that balance rapid delivery with maintainability and polish. This means knowing when to build a quick solution and when to invest in the long-term path – always keeping user experience and business impact in mind.
Full-stack involvement: While your focus will be frontend, you should be comfortable venturing into the backend when needed. You’ll integrate frontend features with our GraphQL API and occasionally update server-side code (we use Go/gqlgen) to unblock frontend work. In short, you’ll do what it takes across the stack to deliver a great end-to-end product experience – without ever sacrificing our high bar for UI quality.
Frontend expertise and modern skills: Extensive experience (5+ years) building world-class web interfaces using React, TypeScript, HTML and CSS. You have a proven track record of shipping polished user interfaces in production products . Bonus points if you’ve worked with Tailwind or similar modern CSS frameworks for rapid development.
Design sense and attention to detail: You have a keen eye for good design and care deeply about the details of the user experience. We look for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship and getting even the smallest details right—this aligns with Sierra’s value of craftsmanship. You take pride in creating pixel-perfect, intuitive UIs and will proactively fix even minor UI issues because you value quality.
Strong collaboration and communication: You excel at working closely with designers and product managers to achieve the best outcome. You partner with product and design teams to craft beautiful user experiences , and you communicate clearly about tradeoffs and solutions. You’re open to feedback and can articulate your ideas in discussions, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Self-motivation and drive: You are intensely goal-oriented and proactive, able to take ownership of projects with minimal guidance. You’ve thrived in fast-paced environments and have a track record of delivering projects quickly and frequently. You can manage ambiguity and complexity, breaking down big problems into simple, workable solutions. In short, you get things done with speed and quality in equal measure.
Pragmatic problem-solving: You approach engineering with practicality. You make effective trade-offs between ideal solutions and pragmatic deliverables, always considering the user impact and long-term maintainability. You’re not ideological about technology – you choose the best tool for the job and can learn new technologies on the fly as needed.
Front-to-back understanding: While specializing in frontend, you have a solid understanding of backend fundamentals. You know how web APIs, databases, and servers work. If needed, you can read and write server-side code. In particular, experience with GraphQL APIs and/or Golang (our backend language) is a plus for this role.
Design systems experience: Previous experience building or contributing to design systems or component libraries – either at a company or in open-source—would be a big plus . This means you’ve helped create shared UI frameworks with Figma.
UI/UX specialization: An eye for user experience beyond coding —e.g. some experience with user research, visual design, or interaction design—would help you excel in crafting a delightful product. If you’ve worked closely with UX designers or have design skills yourself, that’s a bonus.
Domain experience: Exposure to AI or ML products, especially building UIs for complex data or AI-driven features. For example, if you’ve built chat interfaces, analytics dashboards, or enterprise SaaS products before, you’ll have useful relevant experience.
Full-stack prowess: Experience with our broader tech stack is helpful. This could mean familiarity with GraphQL (and libraries like gqlgen or Relay), Go or other back-end languages, and cloud platforms. While not required, such experience means you can hit the ground running across our codebase .
Startup mentality: You’ve been an early engineer at a startup or small team before. You understand the intensity and flexibility needed in a startup environment and are excited to wear many hats. If you love taking initiative and having a broad impact, you’ll fit right in.
Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.
Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.
Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.
Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.
Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.
We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:
Flexible (unlimited) paid time off
Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
Life insurance and disability benefits
Retirement plan dependent on country of employment
Parental leave
Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized
Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
Free alphorn lessons
These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.
We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.