About Lingopal
Live translation is one of the hardest real-time systems problems in media. Latency measured in milliseconds. Language nuance measured in culture. Audio fidelity measured in whether a broadcast feels human or broken.
Lingopal powers live multilingual broadcasts for major sports leagues, broadcasters, and enterprise media companies across the world. We're building the team that takes our platform from working to world-class — across every layer of the stack.
The Role
This is a full stack role with a clear arc.
You'll start by doing something most engineers never get the opportunity to do — establish the visual and interaction standard for an entire product from the ground up. That means building a design system that becomes the foundation every engineer builds on, raising the UI/UX bar across customer-facing surfaces, and creating the patterns that make the product feel intentional rather than assembled.
After that foundation is set, you move into the backend. Our platform runs real-time audio and video pipelines at broadcast scale — genuinely hard systems problems where your contributions have immediate and measurable impact. You won't be the engineer who maintains the design system forever. You'll be the engineer who built it, then moved on to harder problems.
If you're a strong full stack engineer who has real design sensibility and is tired of being pigeonholed on one side of the stack, this is the role that changes that.
What You'll Work On
- Design system — establish and own our component library and design system; set the visual and interaction standards the product runs on
- UI/UX review — be the engineering voice for product quality; spot the wall of text where there should be a layout, the friction where there should be flow
- Frontend engineering — own customer-facing surfaces in Next.js and React TypeScript; build experiences that feel as good as they work
- AI-augmented design — use tools like v0, Cursor, and Figma AI to produce design-quality output and move faster than a traditional design-engineering workflow
- Backend pipeline work — contribute to our real-time audio and streaming infrastructure as the frontend foundation matures
- Full stack ownership — move fluidly across the stack as priorities shift; you don't stop at the API boundary
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of full stack engineering experience with genuine depth on both sides of the stack
- Strong Next.js and React TypeScript experience — this is the core of our frontend stack
- Backend systems experience — you've built and operated production services, not just consumed APIs
- Design sensibility — you have real taste, think in layouts not just components, and are bothered by things that don't look or feel right
- Design system experience — you've built or meaningfully contributed to a component library before and have opinions about how it should work
- AI tooling fluency — you've already figured out how to use AI tools to move faster and produce better output; you're not waiting for permission
- The ability to make visual decisions independently — you don't need a designer to tell you what good looks like
- Comfort moving between frontend and backend work as priorities shift — this is a full stack role in the truest sense
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with Tailwind CSS and modern styling approaches
- Experience with Astro or similar modern frontend frameworks
- Familiarity with Bun as a JavaScript runtime
- NextAuth or similar authentication library experience
- Figma proficiency — you can design and prototype, not just implement
- Experience with real-time or latency-sensitive backend systems
- Prior experience at an early-stage startup where you owned multiple layers of the stack
- Familiarity with Rust, Go, or C++ in a systems context
Why This Role
Most full stack roles trend toward one side of the stack over time. This one is honest about the arc — start with a high-ownership frontend challenge, then move into genuinely hard backend systems work. You get to do both, in that order, with real impact at each stage.
The design system you build will define how every customer experiences Lingopal. The backend work you move into will run at broadcast scale for audiences around the world. That's a range of impact most engineers don't get at a single company.
What We Offer
- Competitive salary aligned with Series A benchmarks
- Meaningful equity — structured to reward long-term ownership and impact
- Full health, dental, and vision coverage
- PTO and Sick Leave
- Direct access to leadership and real influence over product and technical direction
- A clear growth path from frontend ownership into backend systems work
We're establishing our Bay Area engineering headquarters between San Jose and San Francisco. This role is based in-office as we build that presence.
