React Engineer — xCharts

About this role

You will help form the xCharts team, build ambitious and complex new features, work on strategic problems, and help grow adoption.

DETAILS OF THE ROLE

- Location: Remote (strong preference for UTC-6 to UTC+5).

- Type of work: Full-time (contractor or employee depending on circumstances https://mui-org.notion.site/Hiring-FAQ-64763b756ae44c37b47b081f98915501#494af1f358794028beb4b7697b5d3102).

- Level: IC4 or above https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dDdPD-flNXlgZ0E3ZxVvCDx27RFuhVWJrcfcjNu_I8k/edit#gid=0.

- 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 Pigment CSS is a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS styling engine. 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 https://mui.com/blog/mui-product-comparison/.

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.

For additional details about the culture, you can check our careers https://mui.com/careers/ and about https://mui.com/about/ pages and also our public Handbook https://mui-org.notion.site/Handbook-f086d47e10794d5e839aef9dc67f324b.

WHY WE'RE HIRING

The charts team (part of MUI X) needs your help. The component is off to a great start https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=%40mui%2Fx-charts&from=2021-06-01, however, we have only started to scratch the surface of the potential of this component. There is x10 more to build.

To be more specific in what we are aiming to achieve in the short to mid-term:

- A tighter integration with the rest of the MUI libraries including Material UI and MUI X Data Grid

- Faster iteration cycles compared to popular open-source alternatives such as Recharts and Charts.js

This should allow us to reach 30% of the downloads of alternative React charting libraries, considering benchmark data in the short term. Developers value having a single touch point, but also one they trust, and one that integrates well into the rest of their application.

In the mid-term, we aspired for this charting library to become a standard in the React ecosystem, outgrowing Material UI or any other UI library. We believe we can achieve this with an open-core model. We will at least match the features available in the alternative open-source projects, licensed as MIT in MUI X Charts. We will then provide extra paid features so developers can use a single charting library, without the need to juggle with paid alternatives as they do today.

In the long term, we envision using the pro-code charting API as a distribution channel for building more abstract charting primitives, using low-code and AI.

Overall both our open-source community and our premium products are growing fast (x2 YoY). We need talented people to keep that going!

WHY THIS IS INTERESTING

The advanced components portfolio is still small, with a million interesting and challenging problems to solve.

Our products empower React developers to build awesome applications faster – we see millions of developers on MUI's docs every year, one million a month.

The role

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Depending on the day, you'll:

- Help guide architectural decisions. The future of MUI is discussed and planned in our public RFCs and issues. You'll be helping drive these conversations and guiding MUI toward the best possible solutions.

- Contribute to deep, meaningful refactors and feature releases. MUI is a complex codebase. Components we've shipped recently, such as the data grid and date pickers have required months of dedicated, careful work.

- Reduce friction. A large amount of the work on MUI is reducing friction and making it easier to use. This might involve careful API design, identifying and fixing top bugs, creating easier-to-understand error messages, and writing documentation and blog posts about features you ship.

- Collaborate with the community. Many small, as well as meaningful fixes and features, have been contributed by the community. Your role is to draw the best out of the community — to inspire those across the world to create and contribute through your reviews of their issues and pull requests.

- Experiment and play. Great, unexpected features and heisenbug fixes have come from a number of sources — relentlessly methodical processes of elimination, free-flowing team collaboration, inspiration by adjacent libraries and projects, and difficult-to-explain individual strokes of brilliance. Whatever your preferred style is for creating new things that others might not have thought of, you'll find a welcome home on the team.

- Take ownership of features from idea/mockup to…