React Engineer — Docs-infra

Overview

Overview

You will drive the development and maintenance of the documentation platform that powers all MUI products.

Details of the role

Location: Remote (preference for UTC-5 to UTC+2).

Type of work: Full-time (contractor or employee depending on circumstances).

Level: IC3 (with high growth potential) or above.

We’re a remote company, we prefer asynchronous communication over meetings.

The company

MUI’s story began in 2014 with Material UI, the most successful React implementation of Google’s Material Design. Today, Material UI stands as one of the most popular open-source libraries on GitHub and has paved the way for the fully-fledged startup known as MUI (founded in 2019), which now boasts an ever-expanding ecosystem of React UI products. We’re a company of 35+ people as of early 2024, and we’re growing.

The products

MUI is best known for our flagship product, Material UI—but this is just one of three core component libraries we maintain. Base UI is our headless component library, and Joy UI is a sister library to Material UI that implements our own in-house Joy Design system. We also host Design Kits and pre-built Templates.

Beyond the core libraries, MUI X offers advanced components like the Data Grid, Date and Time Pickers, and Charts, for more complex user interactions and data visualization needs.

We’re also making ambitious moves to incorporate our full suite of components into Toolpad, a low-code admin builder tool for assembling full-stack apps faster than ever.

Learn more about MUI’s products in this blog post: An introduction to the MUI ecosystem.

The culture

MUI is a fully remote company with a team that spans the globe. The majority of our work is asynchronous, and we rely on written communication to collaborate. We’re radically transparent: nearly all of our work happens in public. Each contributor has the freedom to decide how and when they work, and that work is primarily self-directed: it’s your responsibility to define and complete your own tasks in a timely manner.

Learn more about what we value as an organization: Evolving MUI’s core values and behaviors.

Why we’re hiring

Documentation is critical to the overall experience of our products, and as one of the leading open-source UI projects, users expect our docs to be the best in class. It’s a differentiating factor for the product.

The docs are the primary means by which developers discover our products and learn how to wield them effectively. And just like the products themselves, the documentation should reflect our fundamental priorities of performance, speed, beauty, and clarity.

Our internal Docs-infra team currently shares responsibility for this domain, and they’ve developed features such as autogenerated OG images, multi-tab component demos, speed performance improvements, and more.

There are so many other features we’d like to implement, and projects we could draw inspiration from (for example, Nextra)—but the existing team (each of whom spends most of their time on one of our product engineering teams) simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to take on bigger and more ambitious projects. For example, we could offer visitors the ability to toggle the design language they want to view the docs in; add automatic conversion of demos to Tailwind CSS; use AI to provide component demo customization; and so much more.

That’s why we’re looking for a skilled full-stack developer to own the docs infrastructure as their full-time responsibility.

The role

As the first full-time React engineer to own this domain, you will work on developing new features and infrastructure-related tasks to make documentation generation and consumption smoother, faster, and more intuitive.

Because this role involves maintaining a platform that all of our products depend on, you will have frequent opportunities to foster cross-team collaboration to gather feedback and iterate on new features. Day-to-day tasks may range from internal configuration improvements (for example, working with Webpack, Babel, Netlify, and other ops tools) to user-facing feature implementation (for example, developing a playground feature teams can use to showcase components), so you should be comfortable working across the full stack of a Next.js-based app. You will also play a fundamental role in defining the Docs-infra roadmap and priorities.

Key responsibilities

Ensure the documentation feels fast and snappy for readers

Monitor Lighthouse scores, bundle size, and search quality to make incremental improvements

Develop new features that will enhance the way the libraries are showcased

Improve the documentation authoring experience for both the maintainers and the community

Own infrastructure tasks like managing dependencies, analytics, TypeScript modules, and hosting, so product teams can stay focused on their primary responsibilities

Tasks and initiatives you might take on

Migrate the docs platform to the Next.js App Router

Allow users to search the docs within a specific product scope

Make it possible to store different parts of our documentation in different repositories

Standardize the documentation design and layout across all of MUI’s products

Introduce a more scalable solution for hosting videos and images

Who we’re looking for

Required

You’re comfortable with the modern JavaScript ecosystem: we use React, TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js, Webpack, and Babel, among other tools

You get energized to dive into complex problems

You’re excited about helping engineers and designers build amazing UIs

You’re highly empathetic

You have good product/design sensibility

You have great written and spoken English skills

Nice to have (but not required)

Strong product/design skills

Experience in open-source

Experience with design systems

Experience with MUI products

Benefits and compensation

We offer competitive compensation commensurate with your experience level and location and are prepared to pay top market rates for someone who can clearly exceed the role’s expectations. You can find the other perks and benefits on the careers page.

Tagged as: 5+ Years, next.js, node.js, React, Typescript