Senior Software Engineer (Frontend) - Core UI

Sanity.io is a modern, flexible content operating system that replaces rigid legacy content management systems so companies like PUMA, Spotify, Figma, Riot Games, and Skims can create amazing digital experiences for their customers.

In this Senior Software Engineer role, you will be responsible for creating the core user experience and helping to make improvements that provide delightful and modern experiences to editorial teams of all sizes. Additionally, you will contribute to the processes, infrastructure, and operational excellence of the Sanity core platform.

What you will do:

• Build user interfaces: planning and implementing delightful surfaces that touch multiple aspects of editorial experience.

• Think about collaboration: Everything in Sanity reacts in real-time to changes in content. Every edit sends structured patches to the server and is applied to connected clients. Presence indicators show who’s editing what. This means our APIs are reactive - “fetch and subscribe” rather than “fetch and return”.

• Debug and optimize: Keeping an eye on performance, figuring out the slowest paths and building good patterns to keep the user interface snappy is important.

• Learn and teach: With a huge community of content editors and developers using the product, you’ll have lots of opportunities to learn from what they are doing with Sanity and how we can make their lives easier. It also means there are opportunities to teach developers internally and externally about best practices and new approaches.

• Continuously improve: There is always room for improvement. We want to improve our test coverage, make our APIs more robust, decouple state from UI, stay up to date with the latest dependencies… In other words: always improving the product.

About you:

• Based in Europe.

• A compassionate, friendly human being who cares about and shows respect to the people you work with and has empathy for our users. We want everyone to feel welcome in our community while using our product, regardless of who they are and what they already know.

• Pragmatic. While we strive to make the best possible solutions, we also need to get value to our users and make sure they are not blocked. This means that sometimes you will need to deliver an incomplete or imperfect solution, which we can iterate on over time, even though you might be tempted to hold off until it is “complete.”

• Conscious about readable, maintainable code. Thoughtful comments, consistent coding style, and following the best practices and guidelines established by the team.

• Able to collaborate effectively with people of different roles and backgrounds - product managers, fellow developers, external clients, and content authors.

Technologies we expect you to know already:

• React. Given our entire set of applications are rendered with React, we really do need you to know your way around useState and useEffect. We really hope you know about the React developer tools, and have gotten your way out of useEffect loops. Context isn’t always the right choice, but we hope you’ve got experience with it anyway. We’d be very happy if you’ve optimized some rendering in a React application, and we’d be absolutely over the moon if you know what useSyncExternalStore is, or know the intricacies of strict mode.

• State management. We don’t really care if you’re an old-time Reflux user, have years of experience with Redux or if you’re on the zustand train - but we do care that you know when and why you might reach for one of these. We’d also like you to know about “selectors”, or other techniques of fine-grained subscription.

• Core web and browser concepts. You need to know what HTTP requests are, what the event loop is (and why it matters), how promises work, how to use browser development tools, and preferably also know your way around some DOM and browser APIs. In other words, you know what the fetch API is and roughly how it works, and you’ve at least heard about IntersectionObserver and getBoundingClientRect.

• Module systems and bundling. No, we don’t need you to be an expert on Webpack. But we DO need you to know what bundlers like Webpack, Vite and Rollup DO. Similarly, we don’t expect you to solve any ESM vs CommonJS issue we may encounter, but we really hope you know what those two names mean, and how they are different.

• TypeScript. The basics: interfaces, types, some knowledge of generics. Why you shouldn’t use any. If you care about type narrowing, discriminated unions and other fancy TypeScript features, we’d be even happier!

• Unit testing. Using something like Jest, vitest, tap, mocha… The framework isn’t important, what is important is that you know why and how to write tests. We’d love it if you could talk about test isolation and the pros/cons of snapshot testing.

Stuff that would be a huge bonus if you know, but not a requirement:

• Automated browser testing. Tools like Cypress, Playwright, Puppeteer, etc.

• Accessibility. Accessible design is good design. We’re constantly striving to make Sanity tools as accessible and inclusive as possible, and a basic familiarity with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and/or an understanding of how people with disabilities browse the web is always welcome.
  

Not sure you’re exactly what we’re looking for in this role? Apply anyway!

What we can offer:

• A highly-skilled, inspiring, and supportive team

• Positive, flexible, and trust-based work environment that encourages long-term professional and personal growth

• A global, multi-culturally diverse group of colleagues and customers

• Comprehensive health plans and perks

• A healthy work-life balance that accommodates individual and family needs

• Competitive salary and stock options program
  

Who we are:

Sanity.io is a modern, flexible content operating system that replaces rigid legacy content management systems. One of our big differentiators is treating content as data so that it can be stored in a single source of truth, but seamlessly adapted and personalized for any channel without extra effort. Forward-thinking companies choose Sanity because they can create tailored content authoring experiences, customized workflows, and content models that reflect their business.

Backed by Netlify, Vercel, the founders of Twitter and Medium, Heroku’s ex-CEO, and leading VCs like ICONIQ Growth, Threshold Ventures, and Lead Edge Capital, Sanity is at the epicenter of the modern digital product development stack.

You can only build a great company with a great culture. Read about our values and join us in building a diverse and inclusive team.

Sanity.io pledges to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse audience that our product serves. We believe that in addition to hiring the best talent, a diversity of perspectives, ideas, and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or gender identity.