Frontend Engineer at Restate

Restate (restate.dev) is a lightweight runtime that turns AI agents, workflows, and backend services into durable processes - so teams can focus on their logic, not failure mechanics.

The role: We're looking for a Frontend Engineer to own the product experience across Restate's UI.

Our UI is where developers end up when something is running, stuck, or has already gone wrong. It's a live window onto a distributed system that keeps moving while you're looking at it. The data is large, it changes under you, and the person reading it is usually in a hurry. That makes it a different job from most frontend work.

You won't be doing this alone. You'll work closely with our design engineers, the wider product team, and the founding team.

The Opportunity

Front-row seat to the biggest infra shift in decades

Durable runtimes like Restate are becoming the next foundational infrastructure component - and increasingly a critical piece for AI applications. As systems become more agentic, long-running, integration-heavy, and failure-prone, durable execution turns reliability from a bespoke engineering tax into a default property. In this role, you’re not watching that shift from the sidelines - you help build the platform that enables it.

State-of-the-art tech, built from first principles

Restate re-imagines durable execution as a lightweight self-contained stack - no database required - and ships as a single Rust binary with an optimized custom storage layer, low latency orchestration, and an analytics engine for observability.

Enterprise Traction

Restate is already used by Fortune 500 companies, including Tier 1 banks running critical financial workflows, and also by cutting-edge AI and infra startups pushing the boundary of what “production-grade agents” mean. You’ll work on problems where reliability, correctness, and operational simplicity are existential.

Work with world-class engineers

You’ll partner directly with engineers who’ve built and operated foundational systems at scale - creators of Apache Flink, and leaders from Meta’s messaging infrastructure. You’ll have the chance to work with incredibly talented individuals who care deeply about their craft.

What You'll Do

The scope includes but is not limited to:

• Own the frontend end-to-end: Architect, build and ship the product UI, from whiteboarding with engineers through to the production code you'll go on maintaining.
• Show what the system is actually doing: Execution timelines, retries, queues, state, failures. People come here to work out what happened, often while under pressure, and the UI has to get them there quickly.
• Build for data at scale: Large result sets, live updates, filtering and search that hold up. That includes the charts and timelines sitting on top of the data, which have to stay honest as the volume grows.
• Make it fast: Restate is a low latency runtime and the UI should feel like one. Rendering cost, data loading and perceived latency are design decisions here, not a cleanup pass at the end.
• Keep it safe to operate: A lot of what this UI renders comes out of our users' own services, and its controls stop, retry and delete real work. Untrusted content, auth, and destructive actions all need more care than they would on an average frontend.
• Push the interaction model further: Keyboard navigation, deep links, state that survives a refresh. We're not where we'd like to be here, and we'd like the next person to care about it.
• Grow the shared component library: Ensure the product stays coherent as it gets bigger, enabling others to build on it seamlessly.
• Work closely with design and engineering: Skip the traditional handoff, iterate together from first sketch to shipped feature.

The Profile

Someone with strong opinions and shipped work that backs them up. You'll have a lot of autonomy and direct access to the founding team, and you should be willing to push back when we're wrong.

Must-haves:

• React and TypeScript: Several years of experience on an application big enough to get messy.
• Performance: Experience profiling and fixing slow rendering, long lists, wasted re-renders, and bundle size.
• Data-intensive interfaces: Datasets bigger than the viewport. Pagination, virtualization, filtering, search, and charts built on real data.
• Data fetching and client state: Caching, invalidation, polling, streaming, optimistic updates, and robust offline handling.
• Security: Handling untrusted content safely, managing auth and sessions, and evaluating third-party dependencies.
• Information design: Creating clear, dense views that communicate key system information efficiently.
• Accessibility: Semantics, focus management, keyboard navigation, and assistive technology.
• Reading beyond the frontend: Reading API specs, database queries, and backend code to understand integration requirements.
• Testing: Unit and end-to-end testing, alongside good judgment on test maintenance.
• AI literacy: Using AI tools daily for productivity while exercising critical evaluation of generated code.

Nice to haves:

• Prior work on developer tools, observability, or infrastructure products.
• Data visualization expertise: timelines, traces, graphs, and time series.
• Building or maintaining a production design system.
• Multi-tenant SaaS experience (environments, roles, quotas, usage).
• Willingness to contribute backend endpoint PRs when necessary.

Not a fit:

• You expect a finished design handoff or detailed instructions without providing input.
• You prefer staying strictly above the API layer.
• You want to manage an engineering team rather than remain a senior individual contributor.
• You are not interested in technical infrastructure domain knowledge.

Engagement, Location, and Travel

• Location: Remote in Europe preferred; US remote for exceptional candidates.
• Travel: Minimal; occasional team offsites.