Frontend Engineer & UI Designer (Developer Tooling)

About SearchApi

SearchApi is a real-time SERP API delivering structured data from 100+ search engines and sources, including Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Jobs, Bing, Baidu, YouTube, Amazon, and many more. We power production workloads for Fortune 500 companies and fast-moving startups who need reliable search data at scale. We're a lean, profitable, bootstrapped team. No VC pressure, no bloat. Just engineers shipping real products to real customers.

Why Join Us?

• You own what developers judge us by. The dashboard, the API playground, the docs, the marketing site. The first impression of our product is your work.
• Design and build, no handoff. You take a feature from a Figma mockup to a merged PR yourself. No designs thrown over a wall.
• Real impact. A small team means your work shows up directly in signups, activation, and revenue.
• The best users to design for. You build developer tools for engineers, the most demanding and rewarding audience there is.
• Bootstrapped and Profitable. We answer to customers, not investors. We'd rather hire one person with taste who can ship than a designer and a frontend developer who need a handoff between them.

Tech Stack

• Ruby on Rails 8 with Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus)
• Tailwind CSS and ViewComponentesbuild for JavaScript
• Figma for design
• Native HTML first
• Cursor, Claude, GitHub, and Slack daily
• We ship multiple times a day with CI/CD

The Hard Parts

• Hotwire-first, on purpose. If your instinct for every interaction is to reach for React, you'll fight the stack instead of using it.
• The fun, hard part is getting SPA-grade polish out of Turbo, Stimulus, and native HTML.
• You design AND build. Plenty of people do one well. The bar here is taste plus the discipline to ship it in production code, with tests, that passes review.
• Developer tools are unforgiving. Your users notice a 200ms jank, a misaligned monospace column, or a chart that lies. There's nowhere to hide a sloppy detail.
• Wide surface, one owner. Dashboard, playground, docs, marketing. You constantly decide what to polish and what to leave, with no PM holding the list for you.
• Taste is subjective. You'll defend a design decision in writing, ship it, watch real usage, and change your mind when the data disagrees with you. If you want pixel-perfect specs handed to you and someone to manage you, this isn't for you.

About You

• You design and build. You've shipped frontend you also designed, and it looked genuinely good. Not "good for an engineer."
• Hotwire-native, or close. Fluent in a server-rendered, component-based stack (Rails + Hotwire ideal; Phoenix/LiveView, Django, or Laravel translate). You reach for native HTML before JavaScript.
• Tailwind cold. Real opinions about spacing, type scale, and color systems.
• You love developer tools. You have a favorite dashboard and an API console you think is beautiful, and you can say exactly why.
• Great writer. You can explain a design tradeoff in a PR description without needing a meeting.
• Self-directed. You take a vague "make this nicer," turn it into a plan, and ship it.
• Fluent in English, written and spoken.

Required Experience

• Production frontend you designed and built yourself, with links to show it.
• Strong with a server-rendered, component-based stack (Rails + Hotwire strongly preferred).
• Fluent in Tailwind (or a similar utility CSS) and a real design tool like Figma.

What We Look For

• Two links to UI you designed AND built yourself, ideally a landing or marketing page and a product or app screen. For each, one line on the hardest design decision you made and how you resolved it.
• A portfolio site you built.
• A redesign with a before/after.
• Open-source UI work.
• A Figma file.
• Evidence of taste plus the discipline to ship it in real code.

Signals We Look For

• A portfolio site you built.
• A redesign with a before/after.
• Open-source UI work.
• A Figma file.
• Evidence of taste plus the discipline to ship it in real code.

What You Get

• Fully Remote. Work from anywhere.
• Profit sharing. When we win, you win.
• Learn from the founder. Understand how a real SaaS business grows.