About the role

Northwind Systems is hiring a frontend developer in San Francisco, CA. Frontend here means everything a user actually touches: layout, interaction, accessibility and how fast the first useful pixel arrives. It is measured work — we watch real-user metrics, not a lab score from a fast laptop on office wifi.

The US market for this role is deep and well paid, and candidates rightly compare offers carefully. The band below is the real band — we do not hold a number back for whoever negotiates hardest.

What the work actually looks like

You will build and maintain the interfaces our customers spend their working day inside, work through interaction detail with design rather than receiving it finished, and keep the bundle and the render cost inside an agreed budget release after release. Accessibility is part of the definition of done, not a later audit. The team works a hybrid week out of San Francisco, CA, usually three days together and the rest wherever you work best.

What we look for

This is a lead role. Alongside hands-on work you will shape the direction of your area, mentor two or three engineers and represent the team in planning. Strong HTML and CSS still beat framework trivia in this loop. We are looking for someone who reaches for a semantic element before a div, knows what a screen reader does with their markup, and can tell you what actually made a page slow.

Working at Northwind Systems

Core hours are set by the team rather than by the company, and we are deliberate about protecting long stretches of focus time. The range shown is the annual gross salary band for this role.

Responsibilities

Build accessible, responsive interfaces that work on mid-range devices
Keep Core Web Vitals inside the agreed budget for every release
Turn design intent into interaction detail, questioning it where it does not hold
Write component tests that describe behaviour rather than implementation
Test on real hardware and real connections, not only a desktop emulator

Requirements

Production front-end experience with a modern component framework
Excellent semantic HTML and CSS, including accessible form and dialog patterns
Practical knowledge of Core Web Vitals and how to move them
Experience reading a bundle analysis and acting on it
Comfortable working in a codebase you did not write

Skills

JavaScriptReactCSSAccessibilityWeb PerformanceTypeScript

Benefits

Medical, dental and vision cover from your first day
401(k) with company match
Equity in a company with real revenue
Paid time off with a mandatory two-week minimum

Northwind Systems

San Francisco, CA201-500 peopleDeveloper Tools

Northwind Systems builds the deployment and rollback tooling that sits between a merged pull request and a running service. Around four thousand engineering teams use it, and roughly a third of them have never spoken to a salesperson — they found the CLI, tried it and expensed it.