Why This Role Matters

At Kai, you’ll build software that makes property renovation effortless, predictable, and designed for life—delivering on our core mission. Real professionals will use your code daily to transform how people create safe, secure, and nourishing homes. This is not abstract work: you'll have clear, objective outcomes and see direct impact on one of humanity’s most fundamental needs—quality housing. As a technical leader, you’ll blend expert front-end execution with cutting-edge AI workflows, helping our team move faster than competitors while delivering code that truly improves people’s lives.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical leadership: As codebase owner, you'll have full authority over the React Native app architecture, establish coding standards, review and approve PRs, and make final technical decisions—all in alignment with our core philosophies.

• Architecture & standards: Define and enforce component systems, style/token systems, and front-end patterns that enable fast, effective iteration across mobile and web.

• Product collaboration: Work closely with product leadership to understand requirements, push back when requirements are unrealistic, unclear or simply don't make sense.

• Production delivery: Ship UI rapidly and repeatably that verifiably meets requirements—exercise judgement about when “good enough” meets requirements or when more precision is needed.

• UI craftsmanship: Make principled visual decisions for alignment, typography, spacing, color, motion, and accessibility; implement pixel-level refinements when needed - filling in any gaps in the ever-evolving designs.

• Cross-platform expertise: Lead React Native development (primary) and contribute to React web when needed; maintain component parity where appropriate.

• Automated testing: Author and advocate for component, integration, and end-to-end tests that validate UI behavior during development.

• AI-first development: Aggressively leverage AI tools and workflows—AI “vibe”/"agentic" coding—to accelerate design→code throughput, prototype rapidly, and reduce grunt work.

• Mentorship & collaboration: Mentor front-end engineers, pair on hard problems, and work closely with backend, product, and design to deliver coherent features.

• Experimentation: Run and measure small experiments to validate UI/UX patterns and developer productivity improvements.

• Metrics: Instrument and review real world product usage to identify opportunities for improvement and optimization.

Philosophical Alignment (Required)

• Speedy. Speed solves everything. While quality remains our ultimate goal, we achieve it through rapid development cycles that enable fast iteration, and by continually refining requirements with verifiable outcomes—tests, metrics, real results—to ensure we hit the mark.

• Pragmatic. What works is what matters; dogma fails. Not everything needs TypeScript. If a practice doesn't accelerate our ability to produce code that verifiably meets requirements right now, we skip it.

• Minimalist. The best part is no part. In all things, less is more. We celebrate deletion and strive to solve each problem with the smallest amount of code—or no code at all.

• Experimental. Always exploring. We actively test the latest AI, technologies, and tools to discover what can make us more productive and efficient.

• Self-improving. We relentlessly seek better ways to work and communicate. We push to adopt workflows and tools that increase speed, sharpen requirements, elevate product quality, automate validation, and enhance how we collaborate.

• Fun. We're in the best industry—solving real problems with software; at the best time—with AI acceleration at our side, and have the best opportunity—to create real impact in real estate, revolutionizing how renovations get done. With a great team and a can-do attitude, all problems are solvable, and we have a blast doing it.

Required Experience & Skills

• Staff-level front-end engineer with minimum 5 years professional front-end experience; 10+ years ideal.

• Deep mastery of TypeScript, React, and React Native; strong component architecture and styling system experience.

• Proven track record shipping production React Native apps.

• Strong eye for visual design and practical implementation skills (alignment, typography, color, motion, accessibility).

• Comfortable building fast, reliable test suites for UI.

• Demonstrable use of AI tools in development workflows; ready to discuss concrete productivity gains from AI “vibe” coding.

• Excellent English communication and cross-discipline collaboration skills.

Nice to Have

• Comfortable working on backend tasks when needed.

• Experience building image- and video-first applications in React Native.

• Experience integrating AI into UX (generative interfaces, assistive features, model-backed UI).

• Experience building design systems or component libraries that span mobile + web.

• Familiarity with design tools and token workflows (Figma, design tokens).

Location: Remote (Preference: European or Continental US time zones)

Core Hours: 12pm to 2pm EST (4-hour overlap required)