Staff Frontend Engineer (Design Systems & UX)

**About Deep Origin** Deep Origin is a biotech startup building an operating system for science that transforms how life science research is conducted. Led by Michael Antonov, co-founder of Oculus, and backed by Formic Ventures, we are redefining the infrastructure behind modern drug discovery. Our AI-driven platform enables scientists to accelerate discovery, reduce cost, and bring breakthrough innovations to life faster. As we scale, engineering excellence is a critical lever in advancing our mission to dramatically reduce disease and extend human healthspan. **Role Description** This is a Staff-level frontend engineering role for someone with strong product and UX judgment. You'll architect and ship the front-end systems behind an operating system for science, while helping define whether the product is actually good to use, not just functional. We don't have a dedicated product design team, so frontend engineers play a direct role in shaping interaction design, usability, and product quality. We want an engineer who can look at a complex scientific workflow, identify what is unclear or inefficient, propose a better direction, and ship high-quality product UI in close collaboration with the team. As a Staff engineer you set technical direction for the front end: component architecture, the design system, state management patterns, performance budgets, and the standards that keep the codebase coherent as the team and product grow. You also bring strong product and UX judgment to how our tools look, feel, and behave across drug discovery tools, simulation interfaces, data explorers, and research workflows. In this role, frontend architecture and product UX are tightly connected: you help define the point where design quality meets production code. You raise the team’s craft through architecture, shared patterns, code review, pairing, and pragmatic product judgment, helping the team ship interfaces that are coherent, usable, and technically sound. - 7+ years building production web applications, with deep command of React, TypeScript, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, and a track record of owning front-end architecture from design through ship. - Real technical leadership. You've set front-end standards, made architecture decisions, and pulled up the engineering bar for a team, not just shipped your own features. - Strong design instincts and spatial sense. You notice when the padding is off, when a flow has one step too many, when a table is burying the column that matters. - Experience with data-heavy, workflow-heavy, or tool-heavy products: scientific software, developer tools, analytics platforms, design tools, or similar. - Comfort with ambiguity. Hand you a loosely defined problem and you'll sketch a few approaches and make the case for one. - Product thinking at the interaction level. You ask whether the flow makes sense and whether the user has enough context, not just whether the screen looks good. - Solid front-end fundamentals at scale: state management, responsive and cross-browser work, testing, performance profiling, and clean version control habits. - Comfort with data visualization past the standard chart library, where the visualization is the interface. - A portfolio or body of work that shows craft, ideally with code you can talk through. **Nice to have** - Experience with scientific or biotech software. - Background in or exposure to computational chemistry, biology, or physics, scientific research workflows, or drug discovery. - Experience establishing design patterns or component standards on a team without dedicated product designers. - Familiarity with 3D rendering or molecular visualization libraries (e.g., Mol\*, NGL, 3Dmol.js) or WebGL. **What This Isn't** - A visual or graphic design role. We're not looking for someone to make marketing assets. - A design-only role where you hand off specs. You write and ship the code. - A standard frontend role with a "design eye." The title says Frontend Engineer becaus…