Frontend development in Los Angeles
A premiere page, a trailer drop or an album launch is a frontend with one day to get right. Los Angeles marketing sites carry heavy video and imagery, go out to a large audience all at once, and are judged on how they feel on a phone in a queue for coffee. A beautiful page that takes several seconds to show anything loses the people a campaign paid to reach.
We build these frontends in Next.js and React with media handled properly: images sized and served in modern formats, video that starts quickly without blocking the page, and pages rendered ahead of time so a traffic spike hits a cache rather than a server. Captions, keyboard navigation and contrast are built in, because an entertainment audience includes everyone.
Los Angeles buys software for businesses that make things people watch, wear, listen to and fly. Entertainment and media are the obvious ones: studios, streaming services, post-production houses, music companies, games and the creator economy that grew up around them. Alongside them sit consumer brands selling direct to customers online, a fast-growing aerospace cluster around El Segundo and the South Bay, and the logistics trade that runs through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The buyer might be a creator with an audience, a studio's technology team or the operations lead at a launch company.
Each brings a different system. Media is heavy: video has to be ingested, transcoded, stored and served, storage and egress costs grow faster than anything else on the bill, and rights and territory windows decide who may watch what, where and when. Consumer brands live with launch-day spikes, when one post or one drop sends a surge of traffic in minutes. Creator platforms need moderation that keeps the product feeling fast. The South Bay's aerospace companies grow quickly and need the commercial software around the engineering: hiring and supplier portals, fan and merchandise stores, and the scheduling and operations tools a company outgrows spreadsheets for.
Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Los Angeles at around $147,000, and studios, streamers and the large technology campuses in the city compete for the same people. Much of the work here also runs to a fixed date: a premiere, a new season, a product drop, a launch window. When the date is set and the team is short, a senior engineer who can start in days on a defined piece of work is often the quickest way to hit it.
We work from Bengaluru with four hours of live overlap every working day, placed across your morning in Los Angeles. Stand-ups, reviews and launch planning happen in that window, with the engineer who writes the code. Everything decided outside it goes into your repository, your tracker and the runbooks we write as we go, so each morning starts with a clear record of what moved.
We fit best around a fixed date: a store before a drop, a media pipeline before a new season, a creator app before launch, or commercial tools for a fast-growing South Bay company. Senior capacity starts in days, usually with a fixed-price two-week piece. Agencies can bring us in white-label, under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
We measure on real devices and real traffic first, not a lab score on a fast laptop. The fix is usually less JavaScript: a smaller bundle, images sized for the screen, and third-party scripts that stop blocking the first render.
A procurement checklist, a customer complaint, or a letter from a lawyer. We fix the causes rather than the line items: real buttons, labelled forms, focus that lands somewhere sensible, and automated checks in CI so it stays fixed.
Global state that everything reads, no types, and three versions of the same modal. We add TypeScript file by file, put tests on the flows that make money, and move shared pieces into one component library as screens are touched.
Usually for search visibility or first-load speed. We move it route by route behind the same URLs, so the old app keeps serving while the new one takes over, and nobody has to sign off a risky weekend cut-over.
A Next.js web app with five operational dashboards and Tableau reports rendered in place, without a second login.
Read the write-up →Asked by Los Angeles teams.
How do you work with teams in Los Angeles?+
We are in Bengaluru, with four hours of live overlap every working day placed across your Los Angeles morning. That window holds stand-ups, design reviews and launch planning, and you talk to the engineer who writes the code. We work in your Slack, your GitHub and your Linear, so progress shows up where your team already looks. Work finished outside the window is written up there too, ready when your day starts.
Do you build for media and entertainment companies?+
Yes. We build ingest and transcoding pipelines, rights and territory windows held as data, review platforms with expiring, watermarked links for outside collaborators, and archive search that finds a line of dialogue by its timecode. For labels and creator networks, we build the pipelines that turn platform statements into accurate payouts. Each piece is scoped to ship before the premiere, season or release date it is meant for.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Los Angeles?+
Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Los Angeles at about $147,000, before equity, benefits and recruiting fees. Our published rate is $35 an hour, with a $5,000 minimum. You skip the months of recruiting and the employment overhead, and we can start within days. A fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 is the usual beginning, so you judge us on what ships.
Can you work white-label for a Los Angeles agency?+
Yes. Many Los Angeles creative and digital agencies win the brief and then need engineering behind it. We build under your name: your client sees your agency and your process, and we work inside your Slack, tracker and repositories. We can join client calls in the overlap window or stay behind the scenes. An NDA comes first, and the code belongs to your client from the first commit.
Do we need to move to Next.js?+
Not always. If the app sits behind a login and nobody finds it through search, a well-built React single-page app on Vite is simpler to host and easier to reason about. Next.js earns its keep when first load and search visibility matter, or when you want rendering close to the data. We will tell you which case you are before anyone rewrites a route.
Can you work from our Figma files?+
Yes, and we will ask questions about them. Designs rarely show the loading state, the empty state, the error, or what happens when a name is twice as long as the mock-up assumed. We raise those early and propose something, rather than inventing it quietly in code and leaving your designer to find out in review.
Will you build us a design system?+
We will build the one your product needs, which is usually smaller than people expect: design tokens, the components you actually use, and Storybook to show them. We extract it from the screens you already have rather than designing it in isolation, because a component library nobody migrates to is just a second way of doing things.
How do you handle accessibility?+
We build to WCAG 2.2 AA by default, test with a keyboard and a screen reader, and run automated checks in CI so regressions are caught before they ship. Automated tools find only part of the problem, so we also test the key journeys by hand: sign-up, checkout, and anything a user does every day.
Do you only do the front end, or the API as well?+
Either. A lot of front-end pain is really an API shaped for a different screen, and when that is the case we can fix both sides. If your backend team owns the API, we write down what the front end needs from it and agree the contract with them, rather than working around it in the browser.