About Shelf

Shelf builds software that helps enterprises make AI work in the real world. That only works when our systems are secure, observable, and maintainable under real production pressure.

About the Role

This role is for a senior backend engineer who will focus full-time on security work.

We are looking for a hands-on engineer who can improve our security posture by changing real systems, fixing real problems, and following through until the work is fully implemented and maintained.

This role is embedded close to support and operational engineering, so it stays connected to real incidents, real customer impact, and real follow-through. The scope is broader than one team. You will work across the company’s engineering surface wherever security work needs to land.

Our backend stack includes TypeScript/Node.js, AWS and Azure, PostgreSQL/Aurora, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, S3, queues, observability tooling, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code. Exact stack match matters less than backend depth, security judgment, and learning speed.

Poland remote, with travel for onboarding and a few planned in-person collaboration sessions per year.

What You Will Own

• Find and fix concrete security issues in production systems.
• Improve token lifecycle, revocation, auth flows, auditability, and access controls across backend systems.
• Reduce or eliminate security-sensitive data exposure in logs, events, traces, and internal tooling.
• Improve security detection, logging, and audit trails so incidents are easier to detect, investigate, and contain.
• Rotate secrets, reduce long-lived credentials, tighten access, and relentlessly follow through on overdue security hygiene work.
• Review security findings from scanners and assessments, separate signal from noise, fix valid issues quickly, and improve the underlying architecture where needed.
• Sweep broadly when necessary, including across many repositories and services, rather than stopping at local ownership boundaries.
• Contribute to AI-security and modern application-security work where relevant, including risks introduced by new AI initiatives.
• Write useful technical documentation, post-incident follow-ups, and implementation notes that help security work stay real after the first fix lands.

What Strong Performance Looks Like

• Security improvements actually land in production and stay maintained over time.
• Important follow-through work does not get dropped because it is tedious, cross-cutting, or spread across many repos.
• You can tell the difference between a theoretical issue and a real one, and you act with urgency when the risk is real.
• Incidents lead to better systems, tighter controls, and faster detection instead of only better wording in a document.
• Teams trust you because you improve security through pragmatic implementation and follow-through.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong senior-level backend engineering experience in production systems.
• Real hands-on experience implementing security improvements in code, infrastructure, or operational workflows.
• Experience with application-security topics such as auth, token handling, access control, audit trails, logging, secrets, vulnerability remediation, or incident follow-through.
• Strong debugging and investigative instincts. You can trace ugly real-world issues through code, logs, and system behavior.
• Comfort working across many services and repositories when the problem requires a broad sweep.
• Ability to go from problem statement to implementation to enforcement with real ownership.
• Clear written and verbal communication. You can explain risk, trade-offs, and follow-up work without hiding behind vague security language.
• AI-native working style. You already use AI tools in your daily engineering workflow and know how to verify their output.

Strong Plus

• Experience improving security posture after real incidents or near-miss events.
• Experience with AI-security, OWASP LLM frameworks, or securing LLM-enabled systems.
• Experience improving queryability, logging, and forensic visibility for incident response.
• Experience moving systems from weak defaults to safer patterns such as stronger token handling or better credential models.

How We Evaluate Fit

We care most about implementation, enforcement, and follow-through. If you are the kind of engineer who sees a real security gap and closes it across the codebase, we want to talk.

What Shelf Offers:

• B2B contract.
• Company Stock Options.
• Hardware: MacBook Pro.
• Modern technical stack. Develop open-source software.
• GitHub Copilot subscription.
• Access to Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, TypingMind, and MCP Servers.

Why Shelf:

• Our Leadership Team has deep knowledge management and AI domain expertise and enterprise SaaS background to execute this plan
• We love our customers and our customers love us. Ask a Shelf customer why, and they’ll tell you it’s because of our innovative capabilities, rock-solid reliability, they truly enjoy working with our people, but most of all – it’s the improvements they see in their business KPIs.
• We have raised over $60 million in funding and our investors include Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Connecticut Innovations, and others
• We have high velocity growth powered by the most innovative product in our category, 3X growth for 3 years in a row
• We now have over 100 employees in multiple U.S. states and European countries, and we have ambitious hiring goals over the next few months

Our Values:

Quality - We’re united by our focus on world‑class Quality. Quality in all things – starting with everything that leaves your desk. Everything you touch – every email, report, campaign, and piece of code – should be outstanding. Your work product should blow people away. Having people look at what you’ve done and say, “Wow.” That’s the standard here. Remember that how you do anything is how you do everything. Focus on craftsmanship—your ability to make things better.

Momentum - for us means that you should know that the things you’re responsible for are moving forward. When you look around and see something that’s stalled, get it moving again. We pride ourselves on “ball movement.” When your boss or team leaves you with something, they should return to see measurable progress. Small, continuous movement is our recipe for success. Constantly look for how to make the work around you move forward. We want you to initiate solutions, ideas, and progress. Don’t wait for it to come to you—reach out and create movement. All the time.

Accountability - We expect every team member to feel that they are accountable for more than anyone might normally expect. Each of us should feel real responsibility for things even at the edge of our control. We consistently share and align on expectations, give each other open and respectful feedback, and use those two drivers to ensure that every agreement we make with one another is clear and complete.

Hard Work - We’re here to do something difficult together. We care intensely about the mission and we expect that from our teammates. That care means that we work hard here. Hard work comes with long hours, extra effort…and real opportunity at Shelf. Your passion for creating and sustaining output is a part of our DNA. Support each other, cheer each other on, drive the mission forward. Great teams sustain intense effort together to win.

Learning Agility - We’re innovating in one of the fastest‑moving spaces in history at a time of accelerating global change. That’s incredibly exciting and requires each of us to commit fully to learning each and every day so that we can be the best at what we do. None of us know everything. All of us can learn anything. Staying open and constantly curious is a key success driver at Shelf. It also requires humility. We prize people who are consistently humble and open to making mistakes and growing from them. Recognize also that learning itself is a skill…we need you to be really good at it. Keep dialing in your own understanding about how you learn best and push yourself to keep growing.

Adapt and Thrive - Overcoming challenges lives deep in our DNA. We have a proud history of understanding and living the reality that obstacles are our opportunities…they’re the key to our success. Change is a constant in our business and fighting change is counterproductive. We need you to be good at being uncomfortable and understand that discomfort is the key to growth. Cultivate your own ability to adapt and know that struggling well is something you’ll share with every team you’re on at Shelf. Our company stories are about thriving through real difficulty…together.

Win Together - We win or lose as a team. Always. Everything you do here is connected to the rest of the organization. Part of our shared team environment demands full honesty…real candor and directness with one another. We expect you to constantly be thinking about how to support your teammates and the company, always acting in service to our shared mission and what’s best for the organization as a whole.

About Shelf

Shelf builds software that helps enterprises make AI work in the real world. For our Voice AI product, that means reliable runtime systems, strong deployment paths, and production infrastructure that lets engineering teams move fast without creating operational chaos.

About the role

This role is for a senior DevOps / platform engineer who can independently own how our Voice AI product ships and runs.

You will work directly with the team building our Voice AI product rather than as part of a generic centralized Platform function. The job is to make deployment, reliability, observability, and operational quality materially better. That includes infrastructure, CI/CD, environments, incident follow-through, and the practical realities of running AI-heavy systems in production.

Real hands-on experience deploying voice-related systems such as STT, TTS, or STS workloads is a strong plus because it is highly relevant to the direction of the work.

Location – Poland remote, with travel for onboarding and periodic in-person collaboration.

What You Will Own

• Improve how Voice AI services are deployed, run, observed, and supported in production.
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code, CI/CD flows, environment setup, and paved paths that reduce developer friction.
• Strengthen observability with better logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts.
• Improve reliability through better operational standards, incident handling, post-incident follow-through, and practical SLO thinking.
• Work across application and infrastructure boundaries when that is what the problem requires.
• Reduce recurring toil through automation, documentation, and better defaults.
• Make sound trade-offs around cost, security, performance, and speed.
• Use AI tools aggressively and well to increase your own leverage and improve engineering workflows.

What Strong Performance Looks Like

• The Voice AI team can ship faster and with fewer avoidable operational issues because of your work.
• The systems you touch become easier to understand, easier to operate, and easier to trust.
• You do not need heavy management to create momentum; you find important gaps and close them.
• You handle real production problems without drama and improve the system after the immediate issue is over.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong senior-level experience in platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, infrastructure engineering, or a similar hands-on role.
• Strong cloud and infrastructure fundamentals in AWS, Azure, or a comparable environment.
• Real experience with infrastructure as code and modern delivery pipelines.
• Strong operational judgment around reliability, observability, incident response, and production systems.
• Comfort moving across layers: infrastructure, backend services, developer workflows, and operational tooling.
• Clear communication and strong written habits, especially around runbooks, postmortems, and technical decision making.
• AI-native working style. You already use AI tools in daily engineering work and think in terms of leverage, automation, and better workflows.

Strong Plus

• Real hands-on experience deploying or operating STT, TTS, STS, or similar voice-model workloads.
• Experience improving developer experience for product teams, not just operating infrastructure in isolation.
• Experience with security, access control, compliance-minded infrastructure, and pragmatic operational guardrails.
• Ability to debug problems that cut across application code, infrastructure, and third-party systems.

How We Evaluate Fit

We care more about independent ownership, systems judgment, and practical operating ability than about a perfect keyword match to every tool we use. If you are the kind of engineer who can step into a messy production environment and make it calmer, faster, and more reliable, we want to talk.

What Shelf Offers

• B2B contract
• Company Stock Options
• Hardware: MacBook Pro
• Modern technical stack. Develop open-source software
• Premier AI development environment: GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI, TypingMind, v0, MCP Servers, plus credits to experiment with emerging AI tools

Why Shelf:

• GenAI will be at least a $4 Trillion market by 2032 and Shelf is a core infrastructure that enables GenAI to be deployed at scale
• Our Leadership Team has deep knowledge management and AI domain expertise and enterprise SaaS background to execute this plan
• We've been helping our customers prevent knowledge mismanagement since our founding in 2017
• We have raised over $60 million in funding and our investors include Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Connecticut Innovations, and others
• We have high velocity growth powered by the most innovative product in our category, 3X growth for 3 years in a row
• We now have over 100 employees in multiple U.S. states and European countries, and we have ambitious hiring goals over the next few months

Our Values:

Quality - We’re united by our focus on world‑class Quality. Quality in all things – starting with everything that leaves your desk. Everything you touch – every email, report, campaign, and piece of code – should be outstanding. Your work product should blow people away. Having people look at what you’ve done and say, “Wow.” That’s the standard here. Remember that how you do anything is how you do everything. Focus on craftsmanship—your ability to make things better.

Momentum - for us means that you should know that the things you’re responsible for are moving forward. When you look around and see something that’s stalled, get it moving again. We pride ourselves on “ball movement.” When your boss or team leaves you with something, they should return to see measurable progress. Small, continuous movement is our recipe for success. Constantly look for how to make the work around you move forward. We want you to initiate solutions, ideas, and progress. Don’t wait for it to come to you—reach out and create movement. All the time.

Accountability - We expect every team member to feel that they are accountable for more than anyone might normally expect. Each of us should feel real responsibility for things even at the edge of our control. We consistently share and align on expectations, give each other open and respectful feedback, and use those two drivers to ensure that every agreement we make with one another is clear and complete.

Hard Work - We’re here to do something difficult together. We care intensely about the mission and we expect that from our teammates. That care means that we work hard here. Hard work comes with long hours, extra effort…and real opportunity at Shelf. Your passion for creating and sustaining output is a part of our DNA. Support each other, cheer each other on, drive the mission forward. Great teams sustain intense effort together to win.

Learning Agility - We’re innovating in one of the fastest‑moving spaces in history at a time of accelerating global change. That’s incredibly exciting and requires each of us to commit fully to learning each and every day so that we can be the best at what we do. None of us know everything. All of us can learn anything. Staying open and constantly curious is a key success driver at Shelf. It also requires humility. We prize people who are consistently humble and open to making mistakes and growing from them. Recognize also that learning itself is a skill…we need you to be really good at it. Keep dialing in your own understanding about how you learn best and push yourself to keep growing.

Adapt and Thrive - Overcoming challenges lives deep in our DNA. We have a proud history of understanding and living the reality that obstacles are our opportunities…they’re the key to our success. Change is a constant in our business and fighting change is counterproductive. We need you to be good at being uncomfortable and understand that discomfort is the key to growth. Cultivate your own ability to adapt and know that struggling well is something you’ll share with every team you’re on at Shelf. Our company stories are about thriving through real difficulty…together.

Win Together - We win or lose as a team. Always. Everything you do here is connected to the rest of the organization. Part of our shared team environment demands full honesty…real candor and directness with one another. We expect you to constantly be thinking about how to support your teammates and the company, always acting in service to our shared mission and what’s best for the organization as a whole.

About Shelf

Shelf builds software that helps enterprises make AI work in the real world. We care about the hard part: reliable systems, clear operational logic, and production-grade engineering that makes AI useful instead of brittle.

Job Description:

This role is for a senior backend engineer who can own important systems, not just implement tickets.

You will take ambiguous problems, design the right backend approach, ship it, and keep it healthy in production. We want someone who is strong technically, communicates clearly, and has the judgment to make systems simpler, safer, and easier to evolve over time.

This is a product engineering role with real ownership from system design through production.

What You Will Own

• Design and ship backend services, APIs, data flows, and background processing for production systems.
• Turn vague requirements into concrete technical plans, trade-offs, and execution.
• Own services after launch: reliability, observability, performance, and incident follow-through.
• Make sound decisions around system boundaries, data models, interfaces, and scaling paths.
• Write clear technical specs, architecture notes, and diagrams when they help the team move faster.
• Work closely with product, frontend, and platform engineers to deliver end-to-end outcomes.
• Improve engineering leverage with AI tooling, automation, and internal workflows rather than using AI as a gimmick.
• Raise the quality bar through code review, design review, and pragmatic technical leadership.

What Strong Performance Looks Like

• You reliably move important backend work forward without waiting to be tightly managed.
• Your systems are easier to operate and easier to change because of your design decisions.
• You communicate trade-offs clearly and make the team around you more effective.
• You use AI tools well: to accelerate analysis, implementation, debugging, writing, and repetitive work, while keeping a high verification bar.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong senior-level backend engineering experience in production systems.
• Strong Python skills and the ability to design clean, maintainable backend code.
• Good distributed systems judgment: concurrency, failure handling, data consistency, async work, and service boundaries.
• Hands-on cloud experience in AWS, Azure, or a similar environment.
• Comfort with SQL and NoSQL systems, schema design, and performance tuning.
• Ability to go from problem statement to design to production rollout with real ownership.
• Clear written and verbal communication. You can explain systems, trade-offs, and incidents without hiding behind jargon.
• AI-native working style. You already use AI tools in your daily engineering workflow and want to keep pushing that further.

Strong Plus

• Experience with LLM-backed systems, search, retrieval, AI infrastructure, or data-heavy pipelines.
• Working knowledge of TypeScript or the ability to contribute across the stack when needed.
• Experience shaping technical direction for other engineers, even without formal management responsibility.

How We Evaluate Fit

We care more about ownership, systems judgment, and learning velocity than a perfect keyword match to our stack. If you are the kind of engineer who can take a messy problem and turn it into a strong production system, we want to talk.

What Shelf Offers:

• B2B contract.
• Company Stock Options.
• Hardware: MacBook Pro.
• Modern technical stack. Develop open-source software.
• GitHub Copilot subscription.
• Access to Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, TypingMind, and MCP Servers.

Why Shelf:

• Our Leadership Team has deep knowledge management and AI domain expertise and enterprise SaaS background to execute this plan
• We love our customers and our customers love us. Ask a Shelf customer why, and they’ll tell you it’s because of our innovative capabilities, rock-solid reliability, they truly enjoy working with our people, but most of all – it’s the improvements they see in their business KPIs.
• We have raised over $60 million in funding and our investors include Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Connecticut Innovations, and others
• We have high velocity growth powered by the most innovative product in our category, 3X growth for 3 years in a row
• We now have over 100 employees in multiple U.S. states and European countries, and we have ambitious hiring goals over the next few months

Our Values:

Quality - We’re united by our focus on world‑class Quality. Quality in all things – starting with everything that leaves your desk. Everything you touch – every email, report, campaign, and piece of code – should be outstanding. Your work product should blow people away. Having people look at what you’ve done and say, “Wow.” That’s the standard here. Remember that how you do anything is how you do everything. Focus on craftsmanship—your ability to make things better.

Momentum - for us means that you should know that the things you’re responsible for are moving forward. When you look around and see something that’s stalled, get it moving again. We pride ourselves on “ball movement.” When your boss or team leaves you with something, they should return to see measurable progress. Small, continuous movement is our recipe for success. Constantly look for how to make the work around you move forward. We want you to initiate solutions, ideas, and progress. Don’t wait for it to come to you—reach out and create movement. All the time.

Accountability - We expect every team member to feel that they are accountable for more than anyone might normally expect. Each of us should feel real responsibility for things even at the edge of our control. We consistently share and align on expectations, give each other open and respectful feedback, and use those two drivers to ensure that every agreement we make with one another is clear and complete.

Hard Work - We’re here to do something difficult together. We care intensely about the mission and we expect that from our teammates. That care means that we work hard here. Hard work comes with long hours, extra effort…and real opportunity at Shelf. Your passion for creating and sustaining output is a part of our DNA. Support each other, cheer each other on, drive the mission forward. Great teams sustain intense effort together to win.

Learning Agility - We’re innovating in one of the fastest‑moving spaces in history at a time of accelerating global change. That’s incredibly exciting and requires each of us to commit fully to learning each and every day so that we can be the best at what we do. None of us know everything. All of us can learn anything. Staying open and constantly curious is a key success driver at Shelf. It also requires humility. We prize people who are consistently humble and open to making mistakes and growing from them. Recognize also that learning itself is a skill…we need you to be really good at it. Keep dialing in your own understanding about how you learn best and push yourself to keep growing.

Adapt and Thrive - Overcoming challenges lives deep in our DNA. We have a proud history of understanding and living the reality that obstacles are our opportunities…they’re the key to our success. Change is a constant in our business and fighting change is counterproductive. We need you to be good at being uncomfortable and understand that discomfort is the key to growth. Cultivate your own ability to adapt and know that struggling well is something you’ll share with every team you’re on at Shelf. Our company stories are about thriving through real difficulty…together.

Win Together - We win or lose as a team. Always. Everything you do here is connected to the rest of the organization. Part of our shared team environment demands full honesty…real candor and directness with one another. We expect you to constantly be thinking about how to support your teammates and the company, always acting in service to our shared mission and what’s best for the organization as a whole.

About Shelf

Shelf builds software that helps enterprises make AI work in the real world. We build products people depend on, which means product judgment, engineering quality, and execution speed all matter at the same time.

About the Role

This role is for a senior full stack engineer with strong product instincts.

You will own meaningful product slices end to end: understand the problem, shape the approach, build the frontend and backend pieces, ship them, and improve them based on real usage. We want someone who is equally comfortable improving a user flow, shaping an API, and closing the loop on quality in production.

This is a product engineering role with real end-to-end ownership.

What You Will Own

• Build and ship user-facing product features across frontend and backend boundaries.
• Turn rough product goals into practical solutions with good scope, sensible trade-offs, and strong execution.
• Work comfortably in UI, application logic, APIs, and data flows rather than stopping at team boundaries.
• Partner closely with product and design while still being able to move when the spec is incomplete.
• Improve usability, clarity, performance, and reliability, not just feature completeness.
• Instrument what you ship so we can learn from production behavior and iterate quickly.
• Use AI tools daily to move faster and help improve internal workflows, tooling, and engineering leverage.
• Keep the bar high on code quality, testing, and ownership after launch.

What Strong Performance Looks Like

• You can take a vague product problem and turn it into a shipped, well-reasoned solution.
• Your features feel coherent end-to-end because you care about both implementation and product quality.
• You do not treat frontend and backend as separate worlds; you use both to solve the actual problem.
• You bring momentum. Work moves because you are on it.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong senior-level experience shipping production web products.
• Strong frontend ability with React and TypeScript or an equivalent modern web stack.
• Real backend ability. You do not need to be backend-only, but you can design and ship APIs, backend logic, and data flows when the product needs it.
• Strong product sense. You notice awkward flows, weak defaults, and unnecessary complexity, and you improve them.
• Good judgment about scope, iteration, and technical trade-offs.
• Clear communication and comfort working across engineering, product, and design.
• AI-native working style. You already use AI tools as part of daily implementation and problem solving, and you are excited to improve how engineering work gets done.

Strong Plus

• Experience with AI-powered product experiences such as chat, search, recommendations, workflows, or agent-like systems.
• Experience with Python, Node.js, or both on the backend.
• Experience owning product areas with limited oversight.
• Strong feel for performance, accessibility, and production quality in complex web applications.

How We Evaluate Fit

We care more about end-to-end ownership, product sense, and the ability to ship meaningful work than a perfect match to every framework on paper. If you are the kind of engineer who can make a product better from multiple angles, we want to talk.

What Shelf Offers

• B2B contract.
• Stock options.
• MacBook Pro.
• A strong AI-native engineering environment with modern tools and room to experiment.

Our Values:

Quality - We’re united by our focus on world‑class Quality. Quality in all things – starting with everything that leaves your desk. Everything you touch – every email, report, campaign, and piece of code – should be outstanding. Your work product should blow people away. Having people look at what you’ve done and say, “Wow.” That’s the standard here. Remember that how you do anything is how you do everything. Focus on craftsmanship—your ability to make things better.

Momentum - for us means that you should know that the things you’re responsible for are moving forward. When you look around and see something that’s stalled, get it moving again. We pride ourselves on “ball movement.” When your boss or team leaves you with something, they should return to see measurable progress. Small, continuous movement is our recipe for success. Constantly look for how to make the work around you move forward. We want you to initiate solutions, ideas, and progress. Don’t wait for it to come to you—reach out and create movement. All the time.

Accountability - We expect every team member to feel that they are accountable for more than anyone might normally expect. Each of us should feel real responsibility for things even at the edge of our control. We consistently share and align on expectations, give each other open and respectful feedback, and use those two drivers to ensure that every agreement we make with one another is clear and complete.

Hard Work - We’re here to do something difficult together. We care intensely about the mission and we expect that from our teammates. That care means that we work hard here. Hard work comes with long hours, extra effort…and real opportunity at Shelf. Your passion for creating and sustaining output is a part of our DNA. Support each other, cheer each other on, drive the mission forward. Great teams sustain intense effort together to win.

Learning Agility - We’re innovating in one of the fastest‑moving spaces in history at a time of accelerating global change. That’s incredibly exciting and requires each of us to commit fully to learning each and every day so that we can be the best at what we do. None of us know everything. All of us can learn anything. Staying open and constantly curious is a key success driver at Shelf. It also requires humility. We prize people who are consistently humble and open to making mistakes and growing from them. Recognize also that learning itself is a skill…we need you to be really good at it. Keep dialing in your own understanding about how you learn best and push yourself to keep growing.

Adapt and Thrive - Overcoming challenges lives deep in our DNA. We have a proud history of understanding and living the reality that obstacles are our opportunities…they’re the key to our success. Change is a constant in our business and fighting change is counterproductive. We need you to be good at being uncomfortable and understand that discomfort is the key to growth. Cultivate your own ability to adapt and know that struggling well is something you’ll share with every team you’re on at Shelf. Our company stories are about thriving through real difficulty…together.

Win Together - We win or lose as a team. Always. Everything you do here is connected to the rest of the organization. Part of our shared team environment demands full honesty…real candor and directness with one another. We expect you to constantly be thinking about how to support your teammates and the company, always acting in service to our shared mission and what’s best for the organization as a whole.

About Shelf

The enterprise is going agentic — but most AI agents fail when they hit real business complexity. Shelf is changing that.

We’ve built the operating system for agentic AI: a platform that models your policies, workflows, and operational logic into an AI Data Model so agents don’t just respond — they reason. The result? AI that understands how your business actually runs and delivers precise, compliant, auditable outcomes at scale.

Brands like Amazon, Nespresso, HelloFresh, and KeyBank trust Shelf to power AI agents that resolve 85% of cases autonomously, cut handle times by 20–25%, and turn hours-long processes into seconds. We’re partnered with Microsoft, Salesforce, OpenAI, Snowflake, and Databricks — and recognized by Gartner (Cool Vendor) and IDC (Innovator) for our approach.

If you want to sell the infrastructure that makes agentic AI actually work in the enterprise, you’re in the right place.

Our mission is to empower humanity with better answers everywhere.

Senior Frontend React Developer:

As a Frontend Engineer at Shelf, you'll craft the interfaces that make enterprise AI accessible and trustworthy. While others are building chatbots, we're solving the harder problem: how do you build UIs that help users confidently navigate AI-powered systems processing millions of documents, while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability?

You won't just build React components — you'll architect production-ready Next.js applications that handle high-load scenarios with complex states, real-time AI streaming, and multiple layers of enterprise functionality. Every interface decision you make directly impacts how knowledge workers at the biggest companies in the market interact with their most critical information.

This is frontend engineering at its most demanding. You'll tackle challenges like building real-time streaming interfaces for LLM responses, architecting state management for concurrent AI operations across multiple tenants, creating accessible interfaces for complex knowledge graphs with thousands of nodes, and ensuring blazing fast interactions even with petabytes of searchable content. Your components will bridge everything from enterprise authentication systems to cutting-edge AI models, requiring both sophisticated technical skills and sharp product instincts.

We obsess over frontend quality because we're building the trust layer for AI itself. When your interfaces gracefully handle edge cases, provide clear feedback during AI processing, and remain performant under load, you're not just meeting UX standards - you're directly enabling users to trust AI-powered answers and make critical business decisions with confidence.

You'll work on production SSR applications serving thousands of enterprise users, implementing localization for global markets, ensuring accessibility compliance, and maintaining security standards that pass SOC 2 audits. Your code will integrate with our Elasticsearch clusters, DynamoDB tables, and Aurora PostgreSQL databases through the largest park of REST APIs, handling real-time websocket updates for AI streaming and collaborative features.

We're a product company that ships fast without compromising on lasting quality. You'll work alongside proactive, ever-learning engineers who actively use AI coding assistants (OpenAI Codex, Claude Code) to accelerate development. We build custom MCP servers, implement DSPy pipelines for LLM optimization, and experiment with different AI tools for implementation. In our environment, AI isn't just what we build — it's how we build.

The best engineers we know are drawn to problems that matter. If you're excited by the challenge of building interfaces that make the AI revolution actually usable and trustworthy for enterprise users, this role offers the rare combination of technical depth, meaningful impact, and the prestige of solving UX patterns that the industry hasn't figured out yet.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement production-ready Next.js SSR applications with complex state management, handling high-load scenarios and real-time AI interactions at scale
• Build interfaces for AI-powered features including streaming LLM responses, semantic search across millions of documents, interactive knowledge graphs, intelligent content recommendations, and AI agentic builders
• Architect component libraries and maintain our design system in Storybook, ensuring reusability, accessibility, and consistent UX patterns across the platform
• Develop enterprise-grade functionality including multi-language support, accessibility compliance, cross-browser compatibility, and security implementations that meet SOC 2 standards
• Create comprehensive technical specifications and component API designs that clearly communicate interface decisions, performance trade-offs, and accessibility considerations
• Build and optimize data-heavy UIs using React Flow for node-based graphs, Highcharts for analytics visualizations, and custom virtualization for handling large datasets
• Instrument components for performance monitoring, track Core Web Vitals, implement error boundaries, and build automated visual regression tests with Playwright
• Take full ownership of the features you build, monitoring their performance in production, optimizing bundle sizes, and ensuring they scale gracefully as user load grows
• Work with SWR for intelligent data fetching, caching, and revalidation strategies that minimize API calls while keeping UIs responsive and data fresh
• Integrate with backend services via REST APIs, handle websocket connections for real-time updates, and implement optimistic UI patterns for seamless user experiences
• Leverage AI coding assistants to accelerate development while maintaining high code quality, and contribute to building internal AI agents that automate frontend workflows
• Stay current with React ecosystem best practices, Next.js updates, AI UX patterns, and modern frontend architecture—experiment with new approaches and share findings with the team
• Contribute to our engineering standards and practices through thoughtful code reviews, mentor colleagues on frontend best practices, and actively participate in our culture of continuous learning

Requirements

• Over 5 years of professional frontend engineering experience, including more than 3 years specializing in React and modern JavaScript/TypeScript
• Production Next.js experience - you've built and shipped SSR applications at scale, understand app router patterns, server components, and the trade-offs between SSR, SSG, and CSR
• Deep TypeScript expertise - you write type-safe code with generics, utility types, and advanced patterns. 
• Complex state management - hands-on experience architecting state solutions for challenging scenarios: real-time collaboration, optimistic updates, multi-tenant data isolation, and large-scale data synchronization
• Enterprise application development - you've built applications with localization (i18n), accessibility, security best practices, and compliance requirements. You understand the complexity beyond "making it work"
• AI/LLM interface experience - you've built interfaces for AI-powered features: streaming token responses, chat UIs, semantic search, or similar real-time AI interactions
• High-load optimization - proven track record optimizing applications for performance under heavy traffic, large datasets, and concurrent operations. You monitor Core Web Vitals and know how to improve them
• Modern CSS mastery - strong expertise with Tailwind CSS and/or CSS-in-JS solutions. You can implement pixel-perfect designs while maintaining responsive layouts and dark mode support
• Write well-structured, testable code with thoughtful component abstractions and clean APIs. You know when to abstract and when to keep it simple
• Strong problem-solving skills and genuine curiosity - you don't wait for designs to be perfect but proactively identify UX issues and propose solutions. You're never satisfied with "good enough" and constantly refine your craft
• Experience with AI coding assistants (OpenAI Codex, Claude, etc.) and eagerness to push the boundaries of AI-assisted development. Part of this role involves creating AI agents to automate portions of the frontend workflow
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools like Datadog, Sentry, or similar platforms for tracking frontend performance and errors in production
• Upper-Intermediate or better English skills for technical communication, documentation, and collaborating with distributed teams
• Present your work effectively both verbally and visually - you can articulate design decisions, create component documentation, and explain technical trade-offs clearly

Be a Plus:

• Experience with React Flow, Highcharts, or other complex data visualization libraries
• Understanding of Node.js/Python/backend fundamentals - you can read backend code and contribute to API design discussions
• Experience with SWR, React Query, or similar data fetching libraries
• Hands-on experience with vector search UIs, RAG interfaces, or semantic search implementations
• Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol), DSPy, or other cutting-edge AI frameworks
• Experience with monorepo tools (Lerna, Turborepo, Nx) and managing shared component libraries
• AWS services knowledge (S3, CloudFront, Lambda) and understanding of serverless architectures
• Built or contributed to design systems or open-source component libraries
• Experience with Playwright, Puppeteer, or Cypress for comprehensive E2E testing
• Experience building AI agent interfaces or agentic AI workflows

What Shelf Offers:

• B2B contract
• Company Stock Options
• Hardware: MacBook Pro
• Modern technical stack. Develop open-source software
• Premier AI development environment: GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, TypingMind, v0, MCP Servers, plus credits for experimenting with emerging AI tools

Why Shelf

• Our Leadership Team has deep knowledge management and AI domain expertise and enterprise SaaS background to execute this plan
• We love our customers and our customers love us. Ask a Shelf customer why, and they’ll tell you it’s because of our innovative capabilities, rock-solid reliability, they truly enjoy working with our people, but most of all – it’s the improvements they see in their business KPIs.
• We have raised over $60 million in funding and our investors include Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Connecticut Innovations, and others
• We have high velocity growth powered by the most innovative product in our category, 3X growth for 3 years in a row
• We now have over 100 employees in multiple U.S. states and European countries, and we have ambitious hiring goals over the next few months

Our Values:

Quality - We’re united by our focus on world‑class Quality. Quality in all things – starting with everything that leaves your desk. Everything you touch – every email, report, campaign, and piece of code – should be outstanding. Your work product should blow people away. Having people look at what you’ve done and say, “Wow.” That’s the standard here. Remember that how you do anything is how you do everything. Focus on craftsmanship—your ability to make things better.

Momentum - for us means that you should know that the things you’re responsible for are moving forward. When you look around and see something that’s stalled, get it moving again. We pride ourselves on “ball movement.” When your boss or team leaves you with something, they should return to see measurable progress. Small, continuous movement is our recipe for success. Constantly look for how to make the work around you move forward. We want you to initiate solutions, ideas, and progress. Don’t wait for it to come to you—reach out and create movement. All the time.

Accountability - We expect every team member to feel that they are accountable for more than anyone might normally expect. Each of us should feel real responsibility for things even at the edge of our control. We consistently share and align on expectations, give each other open and respectful feedback, and use those two drivers to ensure that every agreement we make with one another is clear and complete.

Hard Work - We’re here to do something difficult together. We care intensely about the mission and we expect that from our teammates. That care means that we work hard here. Hard work comes with long hours, extra effort…and real opportunity at Shelf. Your passion for creating and sustaining output is a part of our DNA. Support each other, cheer each other on, drive the mission forward. Great teams sustain intense effort together to win.

Learning Agility - We’re innovating in one of the fastest‑moving spaces in history at a time of accelerating global change. That’s incredibly exciting and requires each of us to commit fully to learning each and every day so that we can be the best at what we do. None of us know everything. All of us can learn anything. Staying open and constantly curious is a key success driver at Shelf. It also requires humility. We prize people who are consistently humble and open to making mistakes and growing from them. Recognize also that learning itself is a skill…we need you to be really good at it. Keep dialing in your own understanding about how you learn best and push yourself to keep growing.

Adapt and Thrive - Overcoming challenges lives deep in our DNA. We have a proud history of understanding and living the reality that obstacles are our opportunities…they’re the key to our success. Change is a constant in our business and fighting change is counterproductive. We need you to be good at being uncomfortable and understand that discomfort is the key to growth. Cultivate your own ability to adapt and know that struggling well is something you’ll share with every team you’re on at Shelf. Our company stories are about thriving through real difficulty…together.

Win Together - We win or lose as a team. Always. Everything you do here is connected to the rest of the organization. Part of our shared team environment demands full honesty…real candor and directness with one another. We expect you to constantly be thinking about how to support your teammates and the company, always acting in service to our shared mission and what’s best for the organization as a whole.