Staff Frontend Engineer

Company: SimpleStudy is a consumer AI platform for exam preparation — "Duolingo for exam prep." Founded in Ireland, the company is post-seed (recently closed a funding round after fundraising in California), with 1.5M+ students across five primary markets: UK, Ireland, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia. ~40–50k new students join every week. The team is ~20 people, operating remotely with a Lisbon office. Notable investors include the first investors of Facebook and Revolut, and board members of Stripe and Intercom (recently sold to Salesforce for $3.6B). The company is lean, product-obsessed, and deliberately not a typical education company — it's built consumer-first, with a heavy PLG and A/B testing culture. Team: Engineering is strong, anchored by Affan as an excellent engineering manager, with skills spread across the stack. There's no dedicated mobile specialist, but two strong engineers are available to help build out the React Native app. Oisin (founder) is directly involved with the team and currently leads product while Affan drives engineering. This new hire would be a senior/staff-level engineer working directly with Affan and Oisin, expected to set a bar for craft and product sensibility across the team. Responsibilities and key results: Own features end-to-end — from ambiguous problem to shipped, polished product — without needing every spec handed to you Work full-stack across the codebase, with a particular eye for the details that make a product feel good: motion, micro-interactions, pixel-level polish Partner directly with Affan and the engineering team, and with Oisin on product direction where design and engineering intersect Help build out the React Native mobile app alongside the two existing resources if needed. Ship fast in a PLG, A/B-testing environment — instrument, measure, iterate Set a bar for craft across the engineering team — the kind of engineer others learn taste from Get hands dirty wherever needed: infra, backend, frontend, animation, whatever the problem demands Requirements: Proficient in Typescript, CSS and HTML Experience with React.js, Next.js 15+, Tailwind, TanStack Query and Jotai (or Zustand/Redux) Familiarity with Git version control and design tools such as Figma. Experience collaborating closely with design teams. Bonus: Experience with Nest.js and Prisma. Bonus: Experience in writing E2E tests using Playwright Bonus: React Native/mobile experience Bonus: Some direct design or animation background (even informally — side projects, Dribbble, personal craft) Bonus: Early-stage or startup experience, ideally at a consumer product Bonus: Background at a consumer PLG company (e.g. Duolingo, Spotify, Strava, Notion, Monzo) Conditions: Ideal: In-person/hybrid in Lisbon Remote in Europe (preference: Western/continental Europe) Salary: no fixed budget. Flexible. Stock options: yes Contract type: full-time employment, independent contractor Tech Stack: Node.js, React.js, React Native, Next.js, Nest.js, Expo, Prisma, Tailwind, AWS