Senior Frontend Engineer
Back seat, older phone, one bar of signal, and the octopus is already waving. Make every lesson load like that.
Tatako is hiring its first Senior Frontend Engineer to own the lessons families open at app.tatako.com. How each lesson sounds, loads and answers a small finger, on any phone or tablet and any signal, is yours to design and build.
About Tatako
Tatako makes short spoken English lessons for little ones. A lesson takes about five minutes, there is nothing to read, and a small round octopus keeps everyone company. He has eight arms, no socks, and usually loses count at seven.
Spanish stays the language of home, and Tatako adds a little English on top. An optional Spanish guide voice explains what to do and switches off anytime. Every lesson has three small steps: Hear it, say it. Touch it. Name it. In the last step the picture comes back without the word, and the child names it first.
The course has 369 first words and phrases, from “hello” and “mommy” to colors, animals and what the teacher says at preschool. Tatako works in the browser on any phone or tablet, and we start with Spanish-speaking families across the United States.
The role
- Remote and full-time, open to candidates who live in Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee or Arizona
- Fluent English
- You report directly to the founders
By day 90, lessons open quickly on the oldest phones we test, the audio keeps its beat in every major browser, and no grown-up’s mark is ever lost to a weak signal.
What you will do
- Give Hear it, say it a steady rhythm: each word three times with a pause to say it out loud, timed on the Web Audio clock, not timers, and sound unlocked on a tap so Safari never stays silent.
- Build Touch it for small hands: two big pictures, generous hit areas, Pointer Events that ignore a resting palm or a second finger, and no lag between touch and response.
- Make lessons open instantly on older phones: code splitting in webpack, the next lesson’s audio and pictures fetched ahead, hashed assets cached on CloudFront and Core Web Vitals read from real devices.
- Keep lessons going on a weak signal: a service worker that caches the app shell and the coming lessons, marks held in IndexedDB until the connection returns, and Safari’s storage rules planned for.
- Wire the guide voice toggle so it switches off mid-sentence and never knocks the lesson voice off its beat.
- Shape the grown-up’s two-minute marks screen: four clear choices per word, from New to Can say, made for one thumb at the end of a long day and saved with each tap.
- Get Google sign-in working wherever a link lands, with a smooth hand-off out of the Instagram, Facebook and TikTok in-app browsers, which Google blocks, and the parent’s place kept.
What you bring
- 5+ years building web apps people use on their phones, with TypeScript and React at the core.
- Deep React with Redux: predictable state for a lesson in progress and renders you can explain in the profiler.
- Audio on the web: the Web Audio API, autoplay rules in every major browser and the habit of testing on a real iPhone.
- Performance craft: bundle analysis, image formats, caching headers, service workers and the Rive web runtime or Lottie tuned for a cheap phone.
- Accessibility built in: semantic HTML, focus order, VoiceOver and TalkBack, WCAG 2.2 AA and a calmer octopus for reduced motion.
- Production habits: Sentry, tests in CI and care for children’s privacy, so ad pixels and ad tracking never load in the lessons.
Bonus points
- You have shipped a progressive web app that families add to their home screen.
- You keep a drawer of old phones for testing, and you use it.
Why you will love it
- The browser is where every family meets the octopus today: your code is the product.
- You set how Tatako feels in the hand: the rhythm of each word and the answer to every touch.
- Built for the phones families already own, hand-me-downs included.
How to apply
Meet the octopus at tatako.com, then email [email protected] with your LinkedIn profile or portfolio. Make sure it shows a web app you made fast on real phones.
If your experience matches the role, our team will get in touch to discuss next steps.