Onlook (https://www.onlook.com/) | Founding Engineer (Fullstack / AI) | San Francisco or REMOTE (US) | Full-time
Onlook is an AI-native visual editor that lets designers, PMS, and engineers collaborate directly in the browser. We launched earlier this year, hit #1 on Hacker News, became the #1 trending repo on GitHub (above DeepSeek + Anthropic), and have grown to 22,000+ stars. We’re now hiring our first Founding Engineer.
We’re a design-led, product-obsessed team backed by YC, and we’re building a next-generation visual IDE used by tens of thousands of designers and engineers.
What you’ll do:
You’ll work across the stack, contribute to one of the fastest-growing OSS projects ever backed by YC, design and ship core parts of the visual editor, work with 100+ contributors, and help define the product with real users. If you’re in SF, we have a beautiful office near South Park.
How to stand out: Share something you’ve built. A project, repo, or portfolio tells us more than a resume.
Very helpful callouts - both areas we want to build more robust product coverage.
Handling tax and VAT edge cases are coming up on our roadmap. We want to offer a merchant of record service soon, and eventually make it so that you can steer the funds flow at a per-transaction level.
We monitor our uptime closely[0], but we're also working on giving more options to self-host the source of truth component of our offering for people who want to be more in control of their certainty.
This is an ultra cool product - stoked someone is building this. We've internationalized our product using ChatGPT O-1 in the JSON files and it's been a real pain to try to decode the strings and otherwise for the text that is in the code.
Definitely going to ask my cofounder to look into implementing this.
- Are there other use cases for this tech besides language translation? Wondering if there are other eng problems that something like this could solve.
- Where are you guys thinking of taking this next? Seems like you're able to handle a lot of languages, so are you just continuing to refine the product or what's the plan for the next couple months and years?
Was it too boring or what was disappointing about the result?
Sonnet 4 has been producing much more reliable outputs, but it's always a challenge to push it to get really creative. I think there are probably great ways we could be prompting for more creative output, but something we'll need to keep experimenting with for sure.
Just as a "for your consideration," how would anyone have known without you weighing in on a HN thread?
I don't know what it is about frontend apps that makes them assume that every request is 200 OK or that every Promise is always .then(response) but as a consumer of the web it drives me batshit, and as a developer of enterprise apps it makes me the bad guy in PRs
Anyway, I'm not exactly wagging my finger at you but rather if this thing you are shipping is designed to help generate apps for people, it would be stellar if the generation included at bare minimum a // TODO watch out for errors
