Senior Staff Frontend Engineer

Who we are

Lilt is the leading AI solution for enterprise translations. Our stack made up of our Contextual AI Engine, Connector APIs, and Human Adaptive Feedback enable global organizations to adopt a true AI translation strategy, focusing on business outcomes instead of outputs. With Lilt, innovative, category-defining organizations like Intel, ASICS, WalkMe, and Canva are using AI technology to deliver multilingual, digital customer experiences at scale.

Our founders, Spence and John met at Google working on Google Translate.  As researchers at Stanford and Berkeley, they both worked on language technology to make information accessible to everyone. They were amazed to learn that Google Translate wasn’t used for enterprise products and services inside the company and left to start a new company to address this need – Lilt. 

At its core, Lilt has always been a machine learning company since its incorporation on March 6, 2015. At the time, machine translation didn’t meet the quality standard for enterprise translations, so Lilt assembled a cutting-edge research team tasked with closing that gap. While meeting customer demand for translation services, Lilt has prioritized investments in Large Language Models, believing that this foundation was imperative to the future of enterprise translation.

As a result, Lilt’s AI technology foundation is similar to ChatGPT and Google Translate, before our patented Contextual AI Engine, connector-first approach, and human-adapted feedback.

Our team is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in Berlin,

About Engineering at Lilt

Lilt is a high-performance, large-scale language translation system. We invest in and prioritize workflow (i.e., usability and interface design) and backend AI systems. Since the translation workforce is distributed worldwide, there are interesting cloud engineering problems to solve. We have a strong preference for building our own backend technology, so you’ll be implementing and working with the latest natural language processing (NLP) techniques and ideas.

About the Role

Work from home allowed up to 3x/wk (within reasonable commuting distance to Emeryville, CA).

This position is eligible for Lilt’s Employee Referral Program.

The Senior Staff Frontend Engineer will apply knowledge of graphic design and animation to perform the

following tasks, dividing time according to the approximate percentages set out below.

1. Execute graphic design tasks involve changing/adding user interface components on the

dashboard, designing, and implementing a customized user interface for translators.

(25%)

The application user interface goes through constant change and enhancements based on business

requirements and consumer feedback. This duty entails the following more specific tasks:

• Conducting meetings with managers and designers to gather business requirements and divide

them into technical tasks and sub-tasks.

• Discussing building wireframes and mockups with designers to set user interface expectations

corresponding to its look and functionality.

• Estimating work efforts based on complexity and time with managers and engineers for each task

following agile methodologies.

• Designing and developing features for customer-facing applications including adding/ modifying

content on the dashboard, adding better upload and download functionalities for all files formats

to be translated, build a robust dropdown that can be filtered by making labels.

• Using advanced CSS animations or third party javaScript plugins to build animations in UI

components to improve user interaction for customers from a static looking website to a more

dynamic experience.

2. Create graphic design templates like mockups and wireframes using Photoshop, Indesign,

or Sketch to display a visual representation of the web application to help and guide

engineers to understand the technical needs and develop the product. (10%)

The user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design process involves utilizing creative and technical

problem-solving and storytelling skills. Areas of focus incorporate content, visual design and

development, information architecture, branding, and customer/technical support. This duty entails the

following more specific tasks:

• Consulting with program managers and lead designers to understand their goals and research

results

• Conducting usability testing and collect data by selecting a few customers that identify existing UI

problems and improve them.

• Creating wireframes, mocks, storyboard, flow charts using a sketch, illustrator, Photoshop to

create a template for development

● Reviewing the design with designers and communicate the development implementation with

other engineers.

3. Research graphic design industry trends and best user-centered design practices using

Photoshop, CSS 3, SASS framework along with CSS media queries for desktop and mobile

software responsiveness. (10%)

This task requires the Senior Staff Frontend Engineer to continually keeping themselves and their

product, Design, and engineering team updated with the latest design changes and trends in industry

standards. More specifically, this includes:

• Continuously reviewing accessibility standards and guidelines which must meet Section 508

regulations

• Continuously reviewing and developing cutting-edge user interface designs that give users clear

direction for navigation

• Developing better solutions to simplify complex user interaction with UI to make customers daily

tasks easier

• Designing mocks based on different screen resolutions like desktops, tablets, and mobiles for

better readability and proper adjustment of UI content and elements (cards, dropdowns, modals,

sidebar navigation).

• Once the mock designs are finished, building UI to test responsiveness on the screen using

HTML, CSS 3, media queries, JSS, Sass.

• Correcting any UI defects based on the screen resolution.

4. Collaborate with graphic designers and engineers with creative and technical problems

and work with software Front End, Back End, Quality Analysts, and Product Managers to

participate in collecting software user interface and user experience graphic design

requirements. Also, work with Graphic Designers, Product Managers, Front End, Back

End, and Quality Assurance Engineers to participate in requirements gathering estimation,

and planning meetings. (10%)

Planning meetings and discussions are crucial day-to-day aspects of the Senior Staff Frontend Engineer

position because it involves evaluating high-level requirements from the product team by asking the right

questions, dividing them into engineering tasks, updating progress, and delivering features before the due

date. These duties include:

• Requirements gathering in order to document all of the end product's functionalities after a

discussion with business stakeholders.

• Conducting meetings to discuss project scope and estimate efforts by providing points that

indicate the duration taken to finish the work.

• If any feature functionality is out of scope or there are questions regarding ambiguity and code

architecture, discussing it during a detailed requirement gathering phase.

• Dividing these requirements into technical sub tasks and for development implementation.

5. Participate in Agile software methodologies for graphic design, including participating in

daily standup meetings to report daily status and to bring up any matters preventing

progress. (5%)

This task requires constant communication between designers, engineers and program managers on

product feature updates to deliver features before deadlines, keep everyone on the same page and

address any issues that may arise during the product development cycle. More specifically, this duty

entails the following:

• Participate in daily stand-up meetings with engineers, designers, and program managers to

discuss the work status of the present and previous day.

• Discuss work blockers, concerns regarding current product feature development and brainstorm

ideas to resolve them. For example, code deployment build failures on Github (central repository

for developers to merge all code) block the new features from getting merged in production.

• Discuss new ideas for product features and provide inputs to the program manager to enhance

the current product features such as performance and visual improvements of the application.

• Schedule meetings with engineers, designers, and managers to discuss specific topics that need

a more detailed discussion. For example, features that need more requirements and changes to

be released to production.

6. Provide leadership and guidance to other graphic designers and UI/UX professionals to

provide creative and complex technical graphic design resolutions. (20%)

The Senior Staff Frontend Engineer will need to work with the design system team to build complex

reusable components that can be used in our applications to improve UI consistency, solve UI bugs, and

build high-end UI components that can use cross-team with functionalities. Specific job duties include the

following:

• Implementing a GIT repository where the design system lives along with StoryBook

(documentation of UI component examples and how to use it) and setup packages such as

typescript, lint, rollup, jest tests.

• Developing components using React (javaScript) with storybook examples, test code for the

components using, and HTML CSS for styling.

• Conducting meetings with the manager, designers, and engineers to discuss design system

issues and solutions.

• Identifying action items to resolve the above problems and update the team through email, slack

channel, and engineering meetings.

• Sending weekly updates to product and engineering teams on new components and their usage

and list discussion topics for the next meeting through email and slack channel.

7. Participate in system design discussions with Back End Engineers about the Application

Programming Interface, and build REST-based server request/response structures. (5%)

• Conduct meetings with engineers and discuss how to set up tables and make API calls to perform

actions.

• Build charts and document technical discussions for other engineers to understand the process of

building the application.

• Constantly communicate with engineers for design changes for example modification in data that

is being sent through the REST-based server request/response structures and new tables

required in the database to maintain more specific data etc.

8. Define necessary data structures which are expected on the client-side to present the

required information in the graphic user interface. (10%)

The client-side architecture requires javaScript data structures to manipulate data received from the

server. In connection with these data structures, this duty involves the following:

• Display data on user interface based on the product requirements

• Create data structures including objects, arrays, sets, strings, hashmaps, binary trees that are

useful structures to store, filter, change data as required using various javascript functions like

map, filter, reduce, etc.

9. Perform end-to-end testing of the software user interface, add client side unit tests to

improve code coverage and ensure that other parts of the application are stable. (5%)

This duty involves unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests using jest, enzyme, puppeteer testing

frameworks based on javaScript to assure extensive code coverage, eliminate side effects, and maintain

a bug-free environment. The specific tasks include:

• Writing unit and integration test codes for javascript functions, design system UI components to

test provide an expected output based on user input.

o For example, if creating a function that takes in an array of string, number, boolean ([

name: "Aditya", id: 121, isConfirmed: true]) and returns an object { name: "Aditya

Sharma", age: 33, accountId: 3332323 ...}, it ensures the object with the following

properties mentioned above is returned; otherwise, the test will fail and then must refactor

the main function for the test code to pass.

• Writing end to end tests that involve testing navigation to different page paths and make sure

nothing breaks.

• Writing code in JavaScript by writing steps in a sequence while each step is connected to a

function that executes synchronously.

• Using the Puppeteer plugin to test our application, where the headless browser automatically

runs the application in the browser and displays our app working smoothly.

Position requires:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering management, or another engineering

field

• 7 years of software engineering experience

• Willing to accept any reasonable combination of education and experience (M.S. + 5 yrs of

exp); Exp. can be gained concurrently with master’s education.

• Large-scale software engineering exp w/JavaScript frameworks – 4 years

• Exp w/Sketch, Storybook, or Figma – 3 years

• Graphic design & UI experience – 3 years

• Exp. using MySQL to develop relational databases – 4 years

Apply:

Apply online at https://lilt.com/careers or submit resume to Lilt, Greg Vincent, 2200 Powell St., Ste. 900,

Emeryville, CA 94608.

Authorization to work in the US is a precondition of employment.

Our Story

Our founders, Spence and John met at Google working on Google Translate. As researchers at Stanford and Berkeley, they both worked on language technology to make information accessible to everyone. They were amazed to learn that Google Translate wasn’t used for enterprise products and services inside the company and left to start a new company to address this need – Lilt.

At its core, Lilt has always been a machine learning company since its incorporation on March 6, 2015. At the time, machine translation didn’t meet the quality standard for enterprise translations, so Lilt assembled a cutting-edge research team tasked with closing that gap. While meeting customer demand for translation services, Lilt has prioritized investments in Large Language Models, believing that this foundation was imperative to the future of enterprise translation.

Benefits

• Compensation: Competitive salary, meaningful equity, 401(k) matching, and flexible time off plus company holidays.

• Medical Benefits: Employees receive coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus FSA/DFSA, HSA, and Commuter benefits. In addition, Lilt pays for basic life insurance, short-term disability, and long-term disability.

• Paid parental leave is provided after 6 months.

• Monthly lifestyle benefit stipend via the Fringe platform to allow employees to customize benefits to their lifestyle.

Lilt is an equal opportunity employer. We extend equal opportunity to all individuals without regard to an individual’s race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic characteristics, veteran or marital status, pregnancy, or any other classification protected by applicable local, state or federal laws. We are committed to the principles of fair employment and the elimination of all discriminatory practices.