Senior Staff Engineer Frontend UI

Lendistry is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. We consider applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or membership in any other group protected by federal, state, or local law. If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected]. Lendistry does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters, employment agencies, or staffing firms. To conduct business with Lendistry, a Master Services Agreement (MSA) must be executed and confirmed prior to submitting any information relating to a potential candidate. Without a signed MSA, Lendistry shall not be responsible to any individual or entity for any payment relating to any form of fee or compensation. And, in the event that a resume or candidate is submitted by a recruiter, employment agency, or a staffing firm without a fully executed MSA, Lendistry has the unrestricted right to pursue and hire any of those candidate(s) without any legal or financial responsibility to the recruiter, agency, and/or firm. A Day in the Life The Senior Staff Engineer, Frontend will architect and lead the user interfaces that borrowers, loan officers, underwriters, and servicing teams rely on every day. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role for an engineer who cares deeply about craft — how an application feels, how it performs, how it degrades gracefully, and how it scales across a growing team. You will drive architectural decisions for our web and mobile applications, set the standards for how we build frontends at Lendistry, and lead and grow a team of engineers. You will partner closely with backend engineers, designers, product managers, and the AI team to ship integrated, polished, accessible experiences that make lending feel simple, even when the systems behind them are not. Lendistry: Who We Are We’re proud to be the nation’s largest minority‑led, tech‑savvy lender for small businesses and commercial real estate. As a certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) and Community Development Entity (CDE), our mission is all about creating economic opportunities and fueling growth for small business owners and their communities. Join us as we pave the way with innovative financing and financial education. What You’ll Be Doing (General Responsibilities) • Borrower experiences — application flows, document upload and collection, status tracking, e‑signature, and servicing portals that millions of dollars in capital flow through. • Internal workbenches — the tools underwriters, credit analysts, servicing reps, and compliance teams use all day; the tools that set Lendistry's productivity ceiling. • AI‑native interfaces — conversational assistants, inline copilots, document Q&A, and the UI patterns that make AI capability trustworthy and accessible to non‑technical users. • The Lendistry design system — a shared, accessible, well‑governed component library that every product team builds on. • Mobile experiences — responsive web today and native‑quality mobile applications as the product roadmap expands. Technical Leadership & Architecture • Own the frontend architecture of Lendistry's web and mobile applications — component architecture, state management, data fetching, routing, and the long‑term evolution of the stack. • Set the technical direction and best practices for frontend engineering — framework choices, design system integration, testing strategy, performance budgets, and accessibility standards. • Influence the product and platform roadmap across responsive web and mobile experiences, representing frontend strategy at the organizational level. • Drive cross‑functional initiatives that span frontend, backend, design, product, and the AI team — particularly the work needed to deliver AI‑native user experiences. Web & Mobile Development • Write high‑quality, maintainable, performant code for large‑scale, consumer‑facing applications — code that other engineers can extend confidently. • Build responsive, mobile‑first web applications and contribute to native or cross‑platform mobile initiatives as Lendistry's product footprint expands. • Translate designs and business requirements into robust, scalable, secure user interfaces — including the complex, conditional, compliance‑sensitive flows that define lending. • Implement and maintain core frontend infrastructure — the design system, component library, shared hooks, data‑fetching layer, feature‑flag plumbing, and error‑handling patterns every product team depends on. • Partner with the AI team to ship customer‑facing AI experiences — streaming responses, tool‑use transparency, citations, controllable generation, and graceful fallback when models or tools fail. Performance, Quality & Accessibility • Diagnose and prevent performance, scalability, and reliability issues across web and mobile — bundle size, render performance, memory, network, and the realities of low‑bandwidth and older‑device users. • Own performance budgets and Core Web Vitals as first‑class engineering concerns, not afterthoughts. • Advocate for accessibility (WCAG AA and beyond) — not as a checklist, but as a baseline commitment to the borrowers we serve. • Raise the bar for product quality and security — input validation, XSS and CSRF hygiene, safe handling of tokens and sensitive data on the client. Mentorship & Collaboration • Lead, mentor, and coach frontend engineers through architecture reviews, design docs, code reviews, and pairing. • Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and backend engineers to deliver integrated solutions — not just shipped screens. • Influence standards through reviews and by modeling what good looks like in code, design partnership, and operational ownership. Innovation & Future‑Proofing • Stay current with emerging frontend, mobile, and AI‑UX trends and assess honestly what is worth adopting versus what is hype. • Research and pilot new technologies to improve developer workflows and product experience — including the integration of AI tools into frontend workflows. • Contribute to a culture of engineering excellence, continuous learning, and craft. AI‑Assisted Development Practice Lendistry engineers are expected to be among the most effective users of AI tools in the company. This is not optional and it is not decoration — it is how we ship. • Daily use of AI coding assistants — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or equivalents — as a standard part of the development loop for code generation, refactoring, testing, documentation, and review. • Clear judgment about when to trust, verify, or override AI‑generated suggestions, particularly in security‑sensitive and business‑critical contexts. • Leadership in evaluating and adopting emerging agentic development tools, and in sharing learnings across Lendistry engineering. • Familiarity with agentic AI development concepts — multi‑step task automation, LLM tool use, prompt engineering for code generation, and the integration of AI agents into engineering workflows. Your Areas of Knowledge and Expertise (Education/Experience & Proficiencies) Core Experience • 10+ years as a software engineer building complex, scalable web, mobile web, and data‑backed applications. • Strong proficiency in JavaScript and TypeScript, including deep understanding of the language, the runtime, the DOM, and modern ECMAScript. • Thorough and deep understanding of React and its core principles — composition, reconciliation, hooks, suspense, and the tradeoffs of modern rendering strategies. • Production experience with modern React workflows — state management (Redux, Zustand, or equivalent), data fetching (React Query, SWR, or equivalent), and server‑driven patterns (Next.js, Remix, or equivalent). • Extensive RESTful AP