Senior / Staff Frontend Engineer – Picnic, New York City

Job Description

🏢 Company Overview

Picnic is reinventing workplace lunch by partnering with local restaurants to batch and deliver individually packaged meals—without fees or tips. With full-stack ownership of kitchens, courier operations, routing, and client applications, Picnic tightly integrates software and logistics to deliver real-time, reliable, and cost-efficient service at scale.

Picnic is in a rapid growth phase, scaling from 10 → 100 markets across North America, and is seeking frontend engineers who want to shape high-performance operational platforms.

💼 Role Overview

As a Senior or Staff Frontend Engineer, you will drive the design, development, and scaling of Picnic’s real-time logistics and operations platforms. You will work across web and mobile surfaces, partnering with backend and operations teams to deliver reliable, high-throughput frontend systems.

This role requires strong technical leadership, deep expertise in React and TypeScript, and a proven ability to deliver performance-optimized, real-time applications.

🛠 Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement high-performance React applications using WebSockets, SSE, and GraphQL subscriptions.
• Contribute to and enhance courier mobile apps built in React Native.
• Lead technical design for complex features and systems, from architecture to production rollout.
• Own projects end-to-end, driving execution, technical decisions, and cross-functional alignment.
• Improve frontend reliability, latency, and scalability in a real-time, high-throughput environment.
• Lead debugging, incident response, and performance investigations for frontend systems.
• Mentor and coach engineers to raise the bar for frontend engineering across the team.

✅ Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with deep frontend expertise.
• Strong experience with TypeScript and modern web application development.
• Solid understanding of client networking, async programming, caching, and client-side state management.
• Experience integrating with GraphQL and REST APIs.
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives and influence architecture and best practices.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers and supporting team growth.
• Comfort working in ambiguous environments and adapting as the product and team evolve.

🌟 Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or operating delivery, logistics, or real-time systems at scale.
• Full-stack experience with an understanding of backend tradeoffs and system design.
• Track record of improving developer productivity through tooling, patterns, or process improvements.
• Familiarity with modern frontend architecture best practices, including performance, security, and usability.

🎯 Why Join Picnic

• Massive market opportunity: Online food delivery continues to grow rapidly.
• Real impact: Your work directly affects couriers, operators, and customers.
• Ownership and influence: Frontend is central to Picnic’s operations.
• Strong engineering culture: Collaborate with experienced engineers who care about craft, impact, and growth.

📍 Location & Schedule

• Based in New York City office.
• In-office collaboration 5 days a week is required for non-field roles.

💰 Compensation

• Base Salary: $176,000 – $242,000 per year (depending on experience).
• Potential for equity awards and annual performance-based bonus.
• Comprehensive benefits, including medical, dental, vision, 401(k), paid parental leave, discretionary vacation, and more.