01 / The role
A small team with a large surface
Cinder is a collaborative editor for field teams, studios and anyone who loses signal halfway through a sentence. The Runtime team keeps documents available, convergent and fast when the network is anything but.
This role sits on the product side of that work. You will not be writing the replication protocol from scratch, but you will decide how it behaves for people: what they see, what they can trust, and what we do when the machinery cannot decide for them.
This is not a research role. We need someone who can ship a considered interface, read a trace when it misbehaves, and explain the result to a customer without hiding behind the protocol.
02 / Responsibilities
What you will own
05 areas
- 01
Own the product surface of sync
ReactTypeScriptLocal-firstReconnect states, merge conflicts, presence and offline fallbacks. You make the hard parts of local-first collaboration feel obvious to the person using them.
- 02
Turn constraints into clear decisions
Systems thinkingWork beside the protocol team to translate replication rules into interface language, empty states and recovery paths that do not require a glossary.
- 03
Raise the floor of the editor
Design systemsMentoringPair with engineers across Canvas and Docs. Improve the shared components you touch instead of forking them, and leave a short written trail for the next person.
- 04
Keep production honest
ObservabilityOn-callOwn the dashboards, alerts and on-call rotation for the surfaces you ship. Investigate the boring failures before they become customer-facing incidents.
- 05
Stay close to the work
ResearchJoin two customer calls a month and read the support queue weekly. Bring what you hear back into the roadmap with evidence, not anecdotes.
03 / Process
Five stages, no theatre
~2 weeks end to end
- 01
2 business days
Application review
A person reads every application. You get a clear answer either way, with a short note if we pass.
Iris + one engineer
- 02
30 min · video
Intro conversation
A real conversation about the work and how we operate. Bring questions about the messy parts.
Iris Calderón, hiring manager
- 03
90 min · paid
Working session
Pair on a small sync problem in a codebase you can read beforehand. No take-home, no whiteboard puzzles.
Two future teammates
- 04
2 × 45 min
Team conversations
Meet the protocol lead and a designer. Ask about on-call, decision-making and what we are still bad at.
Cross-functional
- 05
Same week
Written offer
The band, equity, start date and every assumption in writing. We walk through the numbers with you.
Iris + people ops
04 / Fit
What we are looking for
You bring
- Six or more years shipping production web applications
- Deep TypeScript and React, with a feel for complex state
- You can explain trade-offs in writing before a meeting
- Comfort working across product, protocol and support
Nice to have
- Local-first, CRDT or sync-engine experience
- A design-engineering background or a strong eye
- Maintained open source with real users
- Experience owning a production on-call rotation