Principal Front-End Engineer [Growth]

3Play Media  ·  Remote — US  ·  $220,000 – $250,000

The Role

We are looking for a Principal-level engineer to join our Growth team with significant front-end and platform experience. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, product craft, and modern marketing — you'd build and manage infrastructure for both our Remix product and our Astro marketing site, deliver features alongside the rest of the team, and help build the agentic development platform that lets the whole company — engineers, marketers, designers — ship more, faster, and with higher quality.

You won't be inheriting a playbook. You'll be helping write one. You'd be a great fit if you believe the product is the brand, have good taste in design and dependencies, have already been pushing the frontier on AI-assisted development, and want to ensure we build a performant and accessible experience across all projects.

What You'll Do

• Build up our agent tools and workflows — custom Claude skills, MCP servers, agent loops, and the developer-experience scaffolding around them — so every engineer is meaningfully faster, and so non-technical team members can safely ship content changes and agent-coded pages using Claude Code.
• Do real product work in our Remix and Astro applications alongside the rest of the Growth team — building product pages, managing our design systems, and improving marketing page layouts.
• Dive into our infrastructure to support agents and app development — including Cloudflare (Workers, routing, edge config), Sanity CMS, GitHub Actions, and the product deployments we manage with Werf / Helm / Kubernetes.
• Keep our frontend foundation modern, sane, and beautiful.
• Set up monitors, tests, metrics, dashboards, and traces so we have confidence in page weight, SEO, uptime, accessibility, and visual regressions.

Who You Are

Must-haves

• 8+ years of front-end and infrastructure-adjacent web development, with deep experience in at least one modern React meta-framework (Remix, Next, Tanstack Start, or similar).
• Active, daily use of AI coding agents in your real work (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar), with a track record of building the harness — not just using it. Your own rules, skills, MCP servers, subagents, or agent loops. At this level this is table stakes; we want a peer who's helping construct the agentic platform, not waiting to wedge into one.
• A high-agency, bias-for-action way of working. If we hand you a problem outside your immediate stack — a Cloudflare Worker, a Helm chart, a database schema — your default is to roll up your sleeves and figure it out.
• Cloud fluency with Cloudflare (Workers, Pages, DNS, R2, edge config) and AWS (S3, CloudFront, Lambda@Edge, Route53, IAM, ECS).
• Experience setting up deployments and preview environments on GitHub via GitHub Actions or similar.
• A track record of leading non-trivial frontend migrations — framework upgrades, theme foundations, build-tool swaps, monorepo restructures — without stalling product work in the process.
• Smart opinions about the package ecosystem, dependency hygiene, lockfile discipline, and the cost of every package you add.
• Understanding of a headless CMS and marketing SEO needs — Sanity preferred, but experience with Ghost, Contentful, WordPress headless, or similar is great.
• Strong API and database schema design skills.
• Empathy and communication skills — you'll work closely with marketing, design, product, and engineering to align on requirements and translate them into direct, actionable work.
• A design sensibility — you can tell when something looks off before a designer does, and you care enough to fix it.

Nice-to-haves

• You've shipped animation-heavy marketing or product pages with Framer Motion, Lottie, Remotion, Rive, or similar.
• You've maintained a public-facing site with a meaningful Lighthouse / Core Web Vitals budget.
• You've built or contributed to internal developer tooling that other engineers actually love using.
• Experience with Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Experience with a Rails monolith environment.

⚡ AI at 3Play

3Play is building AI into how we work across every function. We don't expect expertise — we expect curiosity. If you've used AI tools to work smarter, automated something that used to be manual, or found a better way to do your job with technology, that mindset belongs here.

Compensation & Location

Base salary range: $220,000 – $250,000 

This role is bonus eligible

Location: Remote — United States

Employment type: Full-time

About 3Play Media

3Play Media is a technology company making video accessible to everyone. Our captioning, transcription, audio description, and localization solutions serve over 10,000 customers — universities, media companies, enterprises, and government organisations across the US and Canada.

We were founded at MIT Sloan in 2007 and have been building deliberately ever since. The team is small, fast-moving, and low on politics. The work you do here is visible from day one. Headquarters in Boston, MA with offices in Minneapolis, MN and Calgary, AB.

How We Hire

No surprises. No nonsense. Here's how it goes.

📝  Step 1 — Application  Apply through our careers page. We review every application — if you're a fit, you'll hear from us quickly.

🎯  Step 2 — Hiring Manager Interview (30 min)  A focused conversation with your potential manager. We want to understand how you think, how you work, and what drives you.

🧭  Step 3 — Technical Interview(s)  (30 min each)  You'll meet team members discuss technical skills. Same energy — real conversation, no trick questions.

🎤  Step 4 — Presentation Round (45 min)  You'll receive scenarios ahead of time and walk a small panel through your thinking. We're looking for your judgment — not a perfect deck.

💬  Step 5 — Recruiter Check-In (15 min)  A quick touch base on compensation, timing, and any questions before we move forward.

⭐  Step 6 — Executive Interview (30 min)  A final conversation with senior leadership. If you've made it here, we're serious about you.

3Play Media is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds.