---
title: 'Technical Lead, Frontend at Onyx'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/technical-lead-frontend-onyx-san-francisco-11gafjmdk23x'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Technical Lead, Frontend at Onyx

- **Company:** Onyx
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$400k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-09-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/onyx/2b0fbfaf-6f68-45e2-8bd0-e46020f7a36e

## Job description

## 💥 YOUR IMPACT

Onyx is a popular open source project with hundreds of thousands of users. The project has over 13K stars and over 3K community members across Slack and Discord (these stats may already be out of date when you read this). You’ll have the opportunity to build in the open and your work may be used by millions of people in the future.

## 💡 ABOUT THE ROLE

As an early hire, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the core product. Help us become the biggest “GenAI for work” application in the world!

You’ll be:

- Doing everything frontend for the default open-source chat interface, enterprise search platform, and agent builder. Some specific features:
- Beautiful core search and chat experience (animations, speed, etc.). Think building the UI/UX layer for Perplexity AND ChatGPT in one.
- Huge feature set: workspace search, internet search, code interpreter, artifacts, deep research, and so much more
- Collaborating closely with the design team + founders
- Setting frontend priorities and best practices
- Building an exceptional design / frontend engineering culture
- Fostering an open-source community; guiding contributors on adding to the frontend

This is an in-person role based in San Francisco, CA.

## 🚀 YOU’LL BE SUCCESSFUL IF YOU HAVE…

- 4+ years of frontend engineering experience building complex, user-facing applications
- Have an incredible bar for yourself and for others. You want your work to be exceptional, and accept nothing less.
- In-depth experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, NextJS and other modern frontend technologies
- Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams
- Strong product/design intuition.

## ⭐ BONUS POINTS

- Familiar with Python, Postgres
- Degree in Computer Science or related technical field
- Previous founder or early engineer at seed/series-A startup

## 🤝 WHY YOU SHOULD JOIN US

- You like working with brilliant (yet humble), thoughtful, and collaborative people
- Great benefits including fully covered health/dental/vision and transportation reimbursement
- Free meals — We have our Mix’t loyalists and a rebel faction of unhealthy eaters
- Stocked kitchen with drinks, snacks, matcha and an espresso machine
- Monthly company outings (bike rides to Mt. Tamalpais, escape rooms, etc.)
- We enjoy friendly competition — we built an internal ELO system to find the best ping pong players on the team
- Exceptional compensation packages for exceptional people

## About Onyx

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Onyx provides an open-source, enterprise-grade AI chat platform that connects to a company’s documents, apps, and people to deliver accurate, knowledge-grounded answers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage – raised $10M seed round)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Chris Weaver, Yuhong Sun

## Core Business
- **Primary Industries**: Enterprise AI, Knowledge Management, Generative AI Infrastructure
- **Target Customers**: B2B – mid-market to enterprise teams; also widely used by open‑source community (individuals and SMBs)
- **Mission**: “Give your team superpowers” by making every modern team adopt knowledge‑enhanced GenAI within the next five years.

## Products & Services
- **Onyx Platform (Community & Enterprise Editions)**: A full‑featured AI chat interface that uses hybrid search (BM25 + dense embeddings), agentic RAG, deep research, code execution, web search, and custom agents. It connects to 50+ data sources (Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Confluence, Salesforce, etc.) and supports any LLM provider (self‑hosted or proprietary).  
  *Type*: Open‑source SaaS (MIT license for Community Edition; proprietary features in Enterprise Edition).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding – $10M seed round (led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital)
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Khosla Ventures (early backers of OpenAI, DoorDash, GitLab), First Round Capital (Notion, Square, Roblox), Y Combinator (Winter 2024 batch)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Team size of 20 (as of mid‑2025)
  - Customers include Netflix, Ramp, Applied Intuition, and dozens of other teams
  - Open‑source users include Roku, Zendesk, L3Harris
  - 1,000+ teams use the platform
  - Benchmarks show 64–76% win rate against other internal enterprise search solutions

## Competitive Advantages
- **Open Source & Transparent**: Full code visibility, self‑hostable on any infrastructure, no vendor lock‑in.
- **Enterprise‑Grade Security**: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR compliance, RBAC, SSO, audit logs, and granular permission controls.
- **Modular & Extensible**: Clean API interfaces, built‑in agent framework, MCP support, and a thriving open‑source community.
- **Best‑in‑Class Retrieval**: Hybrid search with query expansion, reranking, and citation‑backed answers tested on real workplace questions.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue to build the “application layer for LLMs” with advanced agentic capabilities (deep research, custom agents, code interpreter).
- Expand enterprise adoption through self‑hosted and cloud options while maintaining community engagement.
- Grow developer ecosystem by making Onyx the default open‑source GenAI platform for knowledge retrieval.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Early‑stage startup (20 people) with a strong open‑source ethos; values transparency, autonomy, and impact.
- **Remote / Hybrid / Office**: Based in San Francisco; likely hybrid or in‑person preference (typical for YC startups).
- **Engineering Culture**: Engineers work across the full stack (backend, ML, frontend) on a product used by thousands of teams; contributions to open‑source are encouraged.
- **Notable Perks**: Competitive compensation for seed‑stage ($150K–$400K range per YC jobs page), equity, and the chance to shape a product that is rapidly becoming the “ChatGPT for enterprise knowledge”.

## Sources
1. [onyx.app](https://www.onyx.app/)
2. [Y Combinator – Onyx](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/onyx)
3. [Y Combinator – Onyx Jobs](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/onyx/jobs)
4. [LinkedIn – Onyx AI](https://www.linkedin.com/company/onyx-dot-app)
5. [GitHub – onyx-dot-app/onyx](https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx)
6. [Business Insider – Pitch Deck (Seed Round)](https://www.businessinsider.com/this-pitch-deck-landed-ai-agent-startup-onyx-a-10-million-seed-round) (referenced in YC page)

## Other roles at Onyx

- [Founding Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-account-executive-onyx-san-francisco-5d1g5k7ydczy) — San Francisco, CA
- [Fullstack Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/fullstack-engineer-onyx-san-francisco-1wnr1fqxhnhb) — San Francisco, CA
- [Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-onyx-san-francisco-xa6rpb6f6cnn) — San Francisco, CA