React Front End Developer - Contract 3 months UK

Role overview Build the frontend of a shared visual workspace where people and AI agents work together on complex tasks. The central challenge is a real-time collaborative canvas: users need to manipulate content directly, follow streaming agent activity, and work alongside others while seeing the task and its reasoning. This is a hands-on contract role focused on the canvas and collaboration layer, working with a small, senior product team.

Responsibilities - Develop and refine the interactive canvas and its collaboration features using React and TypeScript. - Handle live updates and streaming AI output in a workspace where multiple people may edit at once. - Design clear rules for state ownership, authority, and conflict resolution in collaborative interactions. - Implement reliable real-time event handling, including reconnects and recovery from missed events. - Work with backend engineers on API shapes, idempotency, and optimistic concurrency. - Use prototypes, design specifications, and tests to guide implementation and learn from user behaviour.

Requirements - Strong frontend engineering experience with React and TypeScript. - Experience building interactive, collaborative interfaces involving direct manipulation or shared state. - Shipped real-time event handling using WebSockets or Server-Sent Events, with an understanding of ordering and unreliable connections. - Ability to work across the API boundary, reason about state ownership, and collaborate on request and response design. - Interest in AI product challenges such as streaming, long-running work, user trust, and control.

Nice to have - Experience with monorepos, CI, quality gates, feature flags, or design systems. - Familiarity with coding agents and how they affect software development.

Benefits and work setup Three-month contract in the UK. The product is in internal alpha, with a small team and a React/TypeScript frontend backed by Python and FastAPI.