---
title: 'Lead Frontend Engineer at Zyphra'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-frontend-engineer-zyphra-san-francisco-d8cyqx60q9fe'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Lead Frontend Engineer at Zyphra

- **Company:** Zyphra
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-03-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zyphra/b1a6f674-290c-4ed9-ad96-b34599186cd4

## Job description

ZYPHRA IS AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COMPANY BASED IN SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA.

## THE ROLE:

As a Lead Frontend Engineer, you’ll lead the design and development of the user-facing side of our agentic system, shaping how users interact with AI across their desktop, browser, and filesystem. You’ll work across interface design, component libraries, and frontend infrastructure to craft seamless, accessible, and intuitive user experiences. You’ll work closely with engineers, ML researchers, and backend teams to bring intelligent agents to life in a way that’s beautifully simple and deeply useful.

## YOU’LL WORK ACROSS:

- Design and development of browser-based and desktop interfaces
- Building and maintaining component libraries and styling systems
- Researching and refining user flows based on real-world usage and feedback
- Prototyping and implementing UI features in collaboration with ML, backend, and systems teams
- Making a complex AI product feel simple, accessible, and empowering for a wide range of users

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR / REQUIREMENTS:

- Strong frontend engineering skills with fluency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript
- Experience with modern frontend frameworks such as React
- Demonstrated attention to UI detail and usability, with a user-first mindset
- Ability to prototype and iterate quickly, both in code and with design tools like Figma
- Experience designing and developing responsive, accessible, and high-performance interfaces
- Strong intuition for HCI principles, accessibility, and visual clarity
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills—especially with engineers, designers, and ML researchers

## QUALIFICATIONS / ADDITIONAL SKILLS:

- Experience designing or building browser extensions or desktop applications (e.g., Electron, Tauri)
- Experience with mobile platforms and responsive design (not required but helpful)
- Prior work on products involving complex workflows, automation, or agentic behavior
- Interest or experience in backend development, APIs, or AI systems to better interface with the full stack
- Familiarity with accessibility standards and inclusive design best practices
- A track record of launching polished and user-loved products
- Passion for systems-level thinking: building reusable design systems, libraries, and scalable patterns
- A clear, opinionated eye for elegant design and user delight

## WHY WORK AT ZYPHRA:

- Our research methodology is grounded in methodical, step-by-step approaches to ambitious goals. Both deep research and engineering excellence are equally valued
- We strongly value new and crazy ideas and are very willing to bet big on new ideas
- We move as quickly as we can; we aim to minimize the bar to impact as low as possible
- We all enjoy what we do and love discussing AI

## BENEFITS AND PERKS:

- Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and FSA plans
- Competitive compensation and 401(k) plan
- Relocation and immigration support on a case-by-case basis
- In-office snacks and meals provided
- Unlimited PTO and company holidays
- In-person team in San Francisco with a collaborative, high-energy environment

## About Zyphra

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zyphra is a full-stack AI company building open foundation models and a sovereign cloud platform to deliver advanced AI to developers, enterprises, and hyperscalers.
- **Entity Type**: Private, Series A
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2020 (some sources cite 2021)
- **Founders**: Krithik Puthalath (CEO), Beren Millidge (Chief Scientist), Danny Martinelli (Head of Product), Tomás Figliolia (Chief Architect)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Foundation Models / Cloud AI Infrastructure
- **Target customers**: Developers, enterprises, and "frontier AI hyperscalers" (B2B)
- **Mission or purpose**: "Open Superintelligence" – to enable sovereign, transparent, and customizable AI that runs on any hardware without vendor lock-in.

## Products & Services
- **[Zyphra Research](https://www.zyphra.com/)**: Open-source foundation models trained on heterogeneous compute, focusing on novel architectures for long-term memory, continual learning, and silicon performance. Released as research prototypes.
- **[Zyphra Cloud](https://www.zyphra.com/)**: Full-stack AI platform built on AMD, designed for long-horizon agents. Provides managed infrastructure for deploying, customizing, and running Zyphra's or third-party models with full data sovereignty.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$11M** (Series A)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: AMD, Intel Capital, Future Ventures, Bison Ventures, Transpose Platform, and others
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew **151.9% YoY** to 53 employees
  - Operates in 5 countries (US, UK, Canada, India, Saudi Arabia) with offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and London
  - Active job postings: 14 (up 16.7% quarterly)
  - LinkedIn followers grew 236.3% year-over-year

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack open-source approach**: Combines novel model architectures (probabilistic computing, heterogeneous compute) with a cloud platform optimized for long-horizon AI agents.
- **Hardware agnosticism**: Promises "run intelligence across any hardware and any provider, without lock-in," with early focus on AMD silicon.
- **Commitment to openness**: Models are transparent, allowing customers to audit reasoning and adapt to specific domains.
- **Sovereignty focus**: Enterprises own their models, data, and deployments – appealing to regulated industries.

## Strategic Focus
- **Priority on architecture innovation** (continual learning, long-term memory, silicon performance) over scaling existing methods.
- **Building a full-stack platform** that tightly couples research breakthroughs with a production-grade cloud service.
- **Scaling the team** aggressively – hiring across research engineering, platform, developer relations, and AI engineering.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture of open research**: Employees contribute to novel model architectures that are publicly released, offering a rare blend of academic freedom and product impact.
- **Heavy engineering focus**: 57% of the team is in technical roles, with a flat structure (62% specialist-level roles).
- **Locations**: San Francisco (HQ) and London, with potential for remote-friendly roles (not explicitly stated).
- **Notable perks**: Not detailed publicly, but typical for a well-funded Series A startup (equity, benefits, etc.).
- **Growth trajectory**: 150%+ headcount growth signals rapid scaling and career advancement opportunities.

## Sources
1. [zyphra.com](https://www.zyphra.com/)
2. [zyphra.com about](https://www.zyphra.com/about)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/zyphra](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zyphra)
4. [linkedin.com/company/zyphra](https://www.linkedin.com/company/zyphra)
5. [cbinsights.com/company/zyphra](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/zyphra)

## Other roles at Zyphra

- [GTM Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-engineer-zyphra-san-francisco-036cvpkp3amk) — San Francisco, CA
- [Principal Solutions Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-solutions-architect-zyphra-san-francisco-tvmr7yr66sye) — San Francisco, CA
- [Developer Relations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-relations-lead-zyphra-san-francisco-8aak96cd9gcr) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - Model Architectures](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-model-architectures-zyphra-san-francisco-q2xft42gbdne) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - Agency and Reasoning](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-agency-and-reasoning-zyphra-san-francisco-n78mrpw38xb2) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - Language Model Pre-Training](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-language-model-pre-training-zyphra-san-francisco-1e2n0tewvz0d) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - Audio & Speech Models](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-audio-speech-models-zyphra-san-francisco-vpqsx2qaz8pm) — San Francisco, CA
- [Data Engineer - Multimodal Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/data-engineer-multimodal-systems-zyphra-san-francisco-kd4wkewajppq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Platform Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-engineer-zyphra-san-francisco-7nkavn90wn8m) — San Francisco, CA
- [Full-Stack Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-software-engineer-zyphra-san-francisco-1066nczj3z2q) — San Francisco, CA