Senior Software Engineer

About Narrative

Narrative is one of NZ’s fastest growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. We build products that cater to a market of millions of professional photographers worldwide, working to significantly reduce their processing time by supporting a better daily workflow with AI powered tools. Our AI-powered tools help professional photographers from more than 160 countries improve their photo selection and photo editing workflows, significantly increasing their productivity. With the backing of top-tier Venture Capitalists – including Founders Fund – and a team of exceptionally talented staff, we are committed to driving innovation in this space.

See https://narrative.so/careers for more info about Narrative and our culture.

Why you'll love working here
We're committed to building products for professional photographers who work with people from all genders, ethnicities, racial and religious backgrounds. We think it’s important that our team reflects the same diverse audience. We're actively working to grow a diverse team and offer:

• Flexible and remote working options
• 1 month paid parental leave in addition to government leave
• 30 hours a week for up to 6 months on full pay following return from parental leave (for both birthing and non-birthing parents)
• Extended sick leave to support our team to get through the many things life can throw your way.
• Based in our office on Karangahape Road in Auckland, New Zealand, with the option to work remotely for three days a week. We find it’s important to have time for face-to-face communication, while also allowing some days to work from home, if one wants.
• Competitive salary commensurate with skills and experience, a 6 monthly review cycle, plus participation in a generous employee share option scheme.

About the Data Stack

Frontend development at Narrative is unique. You won't just be implementing UI and UX components; you'll be solving deep technical challenges at the intersection of performance, usability, and AI. You will be responsible for our Electron app, built with React, TypeScript, and NodeJS, which has access to the underlying OS. We use Canvas2D for image rendering and transformations, while Select's brain is a speedy daemon called Maxwell written in Rust that handles all the heavy lifting including image processing and ML analysis. Select operates in a multi-process environment, whether that's NodeJS processes, web workers, or Rust processes, which comes with its own set of considerations and concerns.

You’ll be dealing with problems not faced by traditional web apps. We are competing against native apps written in C++ using classic web technologies; a tall order for sure.

You’ll be working closely with Rust and AI engineers to deliver polished end-to-end features for Select. Given the nature of our product, we are a very performance-centric team. We’re always looking for new opportunities to make our product faster and to squeeze every last piece of performance out of the technologies we use.

We also work agentic-first. Our engineers use AI coding agents every day to explore the codebase, prototype, write tests, review pull requests and ship faster. We treat agents as part of the team's toolkit, not a novelty, and we expect you to bring strong judgement about where they speed us up and where a human needs to own the detail.

You will also be relentlessly product-focused. You will take a keen interest in how our users are using the product, and how they wish it was better, using hard quantitative and qualitative data to inform concrete product-driven decisions. You understand that everything is a tradeoff, and there are simply not enough hours in the day to do everything. To that end, you are constantly focusing on the most important issues for the product.

In order to succeed in this role, you will need to be curious. We want people who will bring a fresh perspective, questioning how things are done, and experimenting with new approaches and technologies. You will be an active contributor within our engineering team, consistently following best practices while contributing ideas for improvements, participating in technical discussions, and helping maintain our testing standards.

This is a rare opportunity to have influence and impact on a world-class product in an early stage and help make it a success.

About the Role

As a Senior Frontend Engineer, you will be a critical technical leader within our Engineering team, directly shaping the company's technical trajectory and driving the successful execution of complex projects across multiple teams. You will be responsible for defining and championing architectural patterns, managing significant technical debt, and ensuring high-quality, non-disruptive releases. This role demands exceptional communication skills, the ability to influence strategic decisions, and a passion for mentoring and elevating the performance of others. You will also help set how our engineering team works with AI agents: the workflows, guardrails and review standards that let us move faster without lowering the bar on quality.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will:

• Building polished UI and seamless UX.
• Collaborating with your team and coming up with elegant solutions for hard problems.
• Squeezing every drop of performance out of web technologies
• Experimenting with more performant ways to decode and prepare images
• Mentoring colleagues through code reviews, knowledge sharing, and advocating for best practices within the product development team.
• Working with other team members to define requirements and API's for new Select features
• Evolving and contributing to our testing strategy to give us all assurance that Select is solid
• Helping streamline our deployment and testing workflow by extending CI/CD infrastructure
• Working with our product team to deeply understand the customers needs and the best way to deliver features and improvements
• Collaborate towards the establishment of detailed guidelines and standards for product development processes based on industry best practices and your experience
• Using AI coding agents as a core part of your daily workflow, from spikes and prototypes through to tests, refactors and code review
• Shaping how the team works with agents: shared prompts, context files, conventions and review standards for agent-written code
• Building the frontend for AI-led and agent-driven experiences in Select, where the product acts on the photographer's behalf and the UI needs to make that clear, controllable and trustworthy

About You

We are looking for a highly experienced and influential Senior Frontend Engineer who can lead complex initiatives, mentor talent, and drive strategic technical decisions across the organization. The ideal candidate will possess:

• Has many years of experience and has been around the block. Writing elegant and tested code is second nature to you
• You’re adaptable and willing to work across different parts of the stack, continuously learning as needed. We’re looking for a problem solver, not just a [specific-stack] developer.
• Has professional experience with modern web technologies such as Typescript, React, RTK Query, Node, Redux, and TailwindCSS
• You build confidence, technical skills, and motivation in all team members regardless of their role in the company
• You already work agentic-first. You know how to give an agent good context, break work into tasks it can handle, and critically review what it produces. You are excited, not threatened, by how fast this is changing

Skills & Experience

Required:

• 5+ years of experience working with modern frontend technologies and patterns, with a focus on building and maintaining real-world applications (React, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, etc.).
• Comfortable working in a cross-functional agile team, collaborating effectively with product, design, and engineering.
• Writes clean, maintainable, well-structured code with an understanding of component design and frontend architecture.
• Able to own complex, ambiguous projects end to end, leading other engineers where needed, open to learning and willing to share your own experience with the team.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or similar) in day-to-day professional work, with a clear view of their strengths and failure modes.
• Experience writing automated tests (unit, integration, or end-to-end) using tools such as Jest, React Testing Library, or Playwright.
• Solid debugging skills within the frontend stack (developer tools, React DevTools, network debugging).
• Clear communication skills, with the ability to adapt for different technical audiences.

Nice to Have:

• Experience working with Electron.
• Experience working with CI pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions).
• Experience with React meta-frameworks like Next.js.
• Experience building agentic workflows or tooling, such as MCP servers, custom agents, evals or AI-assisted CI checks.
• Experience designing UI for AI features, including streaming, uncertainty, user override and undo.
• Experience working with image or binary data in web applications.
• A keen interest in photography or the creative arts.

At Narrative, we're committed to building AI software that serves everyone, and we want our team to reflect that diversity. Research shows that underrepresented candidates often hesitate to apply unless they meet 100% of the requirements, while others apply at 60%. We encourage you to apply if you're excited about this role. You don't need to check every box to be the right fit for our team.