Product Engineer - UI / Frontend

Overview

Maincode is advancing Matilda, Australia's first fully developed large language model, scaling and deploying it as a live, production-grade AI system. The team is engaged in architecting, training, operating, and serving AI models with full ownership of the stack. This role focuses on the user-facing layer, where the model’s capabilities are accessible and engaging for users.

Role Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain the primary web interface for user interaction with Matilda, including chat, session management, history logs, and settings.
• Create fast, dependable streaming experiences that display model outputs in real time, accommodating token-level updates, partial responses, cancellation options, and retry mechanisms.
• Design and implement user interaction flows for standard and edge cases, addressing latency, uncertainty, refusals, and error handling.
• Design UI workflows that encourage safe and responsible platform use by implementing reporting features, feedback loops, and content moderation tools.
• Continuously refine and polish UI aspects such as layout, typography, spacing, and interactive details directly in code to enhance user experience.
• Focus on improving perceived application performance and responsiveness through considered UI choices.
• Build internal dashboards and tools prioritizing clarity and usability.
• Collaborate closely with backend and infrastructure engineers to integrate APIs, authentication systems, and adhere to system constraints.

Candidate Profile

Ideal candidates are engineers at the early stages of their career (around 1-2 years experience) who value how products feel as much as how they function. Desired traits and skills include:

• Strong aesthetic sense with attention to spacing, typography, motion, and overall polish.
• Focus on interaction quality, emphasizing fine details that affect user experience.
• Interest in bridging design and engineering roles, working beyond strict boundaries.
• The ability to think in terms of user flows and comprehensive states instead of isolated components.
• Confidence in making pragmatic UX decisions and iterating rapidly.
• Good engineering fundamentals producing clean, maintainable code.
• Curiosity, pragmatic mindset, and eagerness to learn from real-world usage data.

Formal design education is not required but having a clear understanding of quality design standards is important.

Technical Skills and Working Style

• Proficiency in TypeScript and contemporary frontend development tooling.
• Experience building production-level web apps with component-based architectures, state management, and API integration.
• Familiarity with building real-time or streaming interfaces using technologies such as Server-Sent Events or WebSockets.
• Aptitude for direct UI adjustments in code and rapid prototyping using modern development tools, including coding agents.
• Strong debugging skills to resolve issues emerging in live conditions.
• Comfort collaborating cross-functionally with research, backend, and infrastructure teams.

Working Environment and Values

Maincode operates a small, fully integrated AI stack team that designs, trains, deploys, and manages large scale models internally without outsourcing. The team values product quality, creative judgment, and taste, considering product experience an integral part of AI system intelligence. This position is full-time, based in Melbourne, requiring close onsite collaboration.

Important Application Information

Applicants must submit demonstrable examples of their past work showcasing their involvement in shaping user experience, visual design, and interaction or product judgment. Work samples can be professional projects or personal endeavors. The company is currently unable to sponsor work visas; candidates must have unrestricted work authorization in Australia.