Associate Front-end Engineer — AI Product Full Time NEW

About Goonj

We are an early-stage, stealth-mode AI product company building a voice-first conversational platform for young professionals from diverse backgrounds. The stack is current (React/React Native, TypeScript, Python backends, AWS, voice AI), the team is small, and the work moves fast.

Role Overview

We are hiring an Associate Frontend Engineer – AI Product

This is a build-and-own role. In the early days you’ll be integrating vendor-delivered designs and components and making targeted UI changes. As you ramp, you’ll take on broader front-end ownership — our mobile app, our website, and the AI-assisted creative work (including ad creation) that supports the product. We want someone who starts by faithfully wiring up what others design and ends up as the custodian of the entire UI surface.

The role is based out of Lucknow.

Key Responsibilities

• UI Integration & Vendor Collaboration
• Take React Native work delivered by our UI/UX vendors and own its integration into the live mobile app — wire components to backend APIs (REST and WebSocket), connect designs to real data, and make the handoff seamless.
• Serve as the technical bridge between our UI/UX vendors and our internal team — review what they deliver, give clear feedback, and make sure their output reaches users intact.
• Translate Figma/design specs into working, responsive, production-quality screens.
• Catch and resolve the gaps where a vendor design meets backend reality — state, auth, error handling, edge cases.

• Front-End Development & Ownership
• Make day-to-day changes and improvements to the UI across the mobile app and website — bug fixes, polish, new screens, performance work.
• Build and maintain reusable component patterns so the UI stays consistent as it grows.
• Own front-end performance: profiling, bundle size, lazy loading, smooth interactions.
• Over time, become the custodian of the UI — the person accountable for the front-end’s quality, consistency, and roadmap.

• Website & AI-Assisted Creative
• Own front-end changes to our marketing website and other web surfaces.
• Use AI tools to help produce creative assets — including ad creation — and build lightweight workflows that make that fast and repeatable.
• Pick up adjacent technical work across our web presence as the need arises.

• Communication & Collaboration
• Work directly with the founder; translate technical trade-offs into plain language for non-technical stakeholders.
• Flag risks and blockers early — especially where vendor deliveries don’t match what we need.
• Stay current with the front-end and GenAI tooling landscape and bring opportunities to the table.

Required Skills & Experience

• 1+ year of professional experience building front-end software.
• Strong in React — components, hooks, state management (Redux or equivalent), routing, and async data flows. You can take a design and ship a clean, responsive implementation.
• Comfortable in JavaScript/TypeScript, modern CSS (Tailwind, Sass, or similar), and responsive design.
•  Hands-on REST API integration — wiring a UI to real backend services, handling loading/error/empty states properly.
• Solid debugging and profiling instincts (browser/React DevTools), and a habit of writing readable, maintainable code.
• Comfortable with Git/GitHub and working in an Agile, vendor-collaborative environment.
• Honest, direct communication — especially when something is broken, unclear, or a vendor delivery falls short.

Preferred (Not Required)

• React Native / mobile app experience. If you’ve shipped web React but not React Native, that’s fine — we expect you to ramp into it quickly, and the role is designed to grow you into it.
• Experience collaborating with external UI/UX vendors or working from Figma handoffs.
• Exposure to AI tools and LLM APIs (Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter) — prompt-driven workflows, API integration, or AI-assisted content/creative generation.
• A UX/design sensibility — usability instincts, research methods, or an eye for detail that makes you a credible custodian of the product’s look and feel.
• WebSocket / real-time UI experience, and exposure to voice or conversational interfaces.
• Basic AWS familiarity and an understanding of how front-end fits into a deployed system.
• A side project or product you actually shipped — tutorials don’t count.

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: You can run the full app locally, you’ve integrated your first vendor-delivered screen end-to-end, and you’ve shipped a real UI change to the mobile app.
• First 90 days: Vendor handoffs flow through you cleanly, the UI is more consistent and faster than when you arrived, and you’ve owned at least one website or creative-tooling improvement start to finish.
• First 6 months: You’re the custodian of our front-end — the person who decides how the UI is built and who keeps it coherent as the product and the team grow.

How We Work

• Small team, in-person in Lucknow, direct collaboration with the founder.
• Stealth product — you’ll see the full product and roadmap from day one, but everything stays internal.
• AI-literate culture: use the tools (Claude, Cursor, Gemini, etc.) openly and well. We care that you understand what you ship, not whether you typed every character.
• We assume good faith, talk straight, and deliver.