Remote — Europe preferred (±2h GMT)
This is a foundational role. You will be the first and sole frontend expert on the team — the person who owns the web experience end to end, from framework choice to shipped product.
About the Role :
We are building a browser-native gaming platform — think Steam, but for the web. The player-facing hub is the product: a games catalogue, player profiles, purchasing flows, social activity feeds, real-time notifications, and embedded game experiences, all running inside a single performant web shell.
You will join a small, senior team (primarily backend engineers) and own the entire frontend. That means choosing the framework, defining the architecture, building the components, and shipping — all with close support from a product/UX person who handles interaction design.
This is not a role where the frontend is an afterthought. The platform lives and dies by how well the web layer performs and feels. The game runs in a frame inside our shell — if the shell is heavy or sluggish, it degrades the game. Getting this right is the job.
What You Will Build :
You will work through these areas roughly in this order:
* Games catalogue & play pages — browsing, previewing, descriptions, launching games
* Core flows — purchasing, login/auth, player library, wishlist, profile
* Social layer — activity feeds, friend systems, real-time chat (WebSocket-driven)
* Embedded content — Twitch streams and other third-party integrations
* In-game UI elements — popups and overlays triggered by game events e.g. in-game purchases Admin / internal panel — dashboards, graphs, game management tooling
* JavaScript SDK — a lightweight SDK for games to integrate with platform features
What We Are Looking For
Must-Have:
* TypeScript — non-negotiable; your primary language
* Angular or Vue (or similar non-React framework) — React is actively discouraged — see below
* Deep browser fundamentals — DOM, rendering, event loops, memory — without needing a framework to explain it
* Performance-first thinking — you know how to build lightweight, efficient UIs and can reason about resource usage
* WebSockets / real-time data — activity feeds, chat, and notifications are all WebSocket-driven; you need to handle streaming data on the frontend
* Responsive / mobile design — the platform must work on desktop and mobile; iOS renders everything via Safari — cross-browser compatibility is essential
* Deployment & CI/CD — you've shipped web apps end-to-end and understand packaging, build pipelines, and release processes
* Frontend testing — unit or integration tests, any framework — you write them as a matter of course
* Gaming affinity — you play games, even casually. You have opinions about what makes a player experience good or bad. This is not optional
Strongly Preferred :
* Portfolio of shipped UI work — actual products or interfaces you can point to, not just a CV
* Single-page application experience — state management, local storage, client-side routing, caching strategies
* JavaScript SDK development — you've built or contributed to a JS library or SDK others consume Performance tooling — CDNs, caching layers, lazy loading, bundle optimisation
* Architecture experience — you've made framework or architectural decisions, or have clear opinions about what you'd choose and why
Why No React?
The platform runs games inside iframes inside our shell. React's runtime overhead competes with the game's own resource usage, which degrades the player experience. Beyond performance, we've consistently found that developers who only know React struggle to work outside its abstractions. We want engineers who understand how the browser works — React-only candidates typically cannot.