Frontend Product Engineer

⛵️ About Wholesail

Wholesale trade, a $55T global market, still operates like the world before the internet and modern payment networks; collection processes are manual and run on paper, short-term credit risk is assumed by the vendor, and businesses rely heavily on legacy ERP systems that don’t talk to each other. The result is large, measurable drag: we estimate that vendors spend over $500B a year on an inefficient mix of processing, bad debt, lending, credit insurance, software, and labor costs to get paid.

Wholesail is building a financial network from the ground up that connects the systems of vendors and buyers involved in wholesale trade to enable streamlined payment and the transfer of risk to third parties. This will allow vendors to offload risk and eliminate tens of billions of waste—while giving creditworthy buyers better terms and third-party capital, unlocking hundreds of billions (ultimately trillions) in additional sales. The primitives of this network scale across industries and geographies: universal ERP integrations, modern payment rails, and a live trade-credit bureau to underwrite risk–which we’re calling Lighthouse.

🛠 About the Role

As Wholesail’s second frontend engineer, you’ll play a critical role in crafting the core user experience that delivers value to the suppliers and buyers on our network. Your work will be primarily focused on the frontend, where you'll build intuitive and performant user interfaces using React. You’ll also make full stack contributions to our Node.js-based systems, such as helping to evolve our notification engine and other backend services that support user-facing features. You’ll also spend time with our sales and support team and our customers to figure out the details of the products you craft. Our small product team wears many hats, so you'll get significant exposure to many areas adjacent to engineering: design, marketing, customer success, sales, and all of the functions of an early stage startup.

As a product oriented member of our engineering team, you’ll couple strong technical execution with an active voice in shaping the product through contribution in product conversations and identifying product/technical tradeoffs. You’ll participate in different styles of execution based on the stage of product development – from iterating quickly on an experiment with intentionally scrappy code to investing in frontend tooling and end-to-end testing infrastructure that increases our team's confidence and velocity over time.

Most significantly, you'll be building the company with us. We are early on our voyage and there are vast uncharted seas ahead. We want to work with fellow Wholesailers who care deeply about the process of building an enduring company: from what values we embrace, how we build our teams, decisions about how we grow our business, and everything in between.

🚀  You’d be great a great fit for our voyage if you…

• Are naturally curious about and have a keen interest in understanding the "why?" by digging into the nuts-and-bolts of how things work as a first principles thinker.
• Think deeply about products – from building empathy for users, to understanding how a product works, how it fits into a complex system, and how it creates business value.
• Obsess about the details of your craft whether it’s designing a new abstraction layer, building an API for a colleague on the frontend team or shipping a pixel perfect feature.
• Quickly build intuition in new domains and are able to articulate product/engineering tradeoffs early on while also pragmatically handling (and minimizing work on) edge cases.
• Estimate and prioritize when faced with different proposed solutions, to help guide the team towards building the most impactful products.
• Strive to quickly deliver value through rapid product validation cycles and have a keen ability to identify quick wins that create value for customers.
• Use data to guide your understanding of user behavior and inform the decisions you make to maximize building value for customers.
• Strive for end-to-end ownership of your work, are proactive with sharing product ideas/opinions, and seek early feedback from other members of your team.
• Build empathy and relationships with strong listening, written, and verbal communication skills – particularly with non-engineering folks such as designers, PMs, support and sales.
• Interested in being an early contributor to agentic AI products – Wholesail has an opportunity to leverage our proprietary data to create autonomous agents that sit natively in our user’ workflows.

🤝 Engineering Culture & Environment

At Wholesail, we started as a team of senior engineers who are passionate about using technology to build products and tools to improve the lives of buyers and sellers in the wholesale industry. Many of us have a background working on technologies used in the relevant food and payments industries, and together with our cross-functional partners, we strive to learn about the problems that our customers in the wholesale industry are facing, so we can work hard to provide solutions for our buyers and sellers.  

Wholesail provides products that help our customers make payments and process orders, which are essential to our customers' business, and therefore we have a strong focus on security, reliability and system performance. We emphasize good engineering practices, and adopt test-driven development and continuous deployment to iterate quickly and confidently. We identify and eliminate or mitigate the impact of single points of failure in our systems. We also genuinely take pride in the craftsmanship of the code we produce, and we love to work with colleagues whose work we respect. Intermixed with all of this is a sense of good humor, and an earnest enjoyment in working together.

Wholesail's tech stack starts with a React single-page web application using modern frameworks like TanStack's react-query and react-table.  The front end supports integrations with third-party services and APIs like Plaid and Stripe and uses tools like Sentry and Mixpanel for error monitoring and analytics.  AI tools like Cursor and Claude are used to improve the developer experience and productivity.  Testing leverages the robust ecosystem of automated testing tools, including the modern end-to-end testing framework Playwright.  Together, these tools allow the front end to integrate smoothly and reliably with a back end tech stack built on Java, Kafka streams, Kubernetes, and PostgreSQL.