Staff Software Engineer

Crossing Hurdles is a global recruitment consultancy partnering with a startup who is building a next-generation AI-native design platform where every visual edit becomes real, executable code in real time with lean team of 19 members and funding of $44M backed by leaders from Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Notion.

Role: Frontend Architect - WebAssembly & Bundling

Compensation: $100k - $300k Equity

Location: San Francisco (On-site/Hybrid)

Experience: 8–12 years (3 years owning runtime/platform architecture)

Tech Stack: WebAssembly (WASM), Browser Runtime Systems

Work Model: IC role (Not a people-management position)

Collaboration: Willing to overlap with the India team (early mornings/evenings in US)

Requirements

• 8 years of experience building systems software in high-growth tech environments
• Experience as a Full-Stack or Frontend Engineer
• Strong WebAssembly (WASM) expertise — ABI boundaries, memory models, host interfaces
• Deep browser platform knowledge (Workers, messaging, storage, isolation)
• Runtime engineering expertise (event loops, scheduling, concurrency, streaming I/O)
• Experience integrating and optimizing JS/TS tooling pipelines
• Performance engineering discipline with measurable improvements (cold start, incremental builds, memory)
• Security experience running untrusted code in the browser
• Experience building high-performance virtual filesystems (in-memory persistence, caching, module resolution)

Roles & Responsibilities

• Architect a browser-native runtime (Node-like execution, task orchestration, streaming I/O)
• Design and build a high-performance virtual filesystem
• Integrate and optimize bundling and tooling pipelines
• Drive measurable performance improvements across execution paths
• Design secure sandboxing and isolation for untrusted code execution
• Set technical direction for runtime architecture
• Mentor engineers while remaining a hands-on individual contributor