Frontend development in Seattle
Developer tools and enterprise consoles are a Seattle speciality, and their users are demanding. Engineers expect keyboard shortcuts, deep links to every state, fast search and screens that stay usable with thousands of resources in them. Enterprise buyers add a question many startups meet late: can everyone on their team use the product, including people who work by keyboard or screen reader?
We build frontends in React and TypeScript for that audience. Tables are virtualised, state lives in the URL, destructive actions ask for confirmation and can be undone where possible, and the interface is built to WCAG from the first component rather than patched at the end. When a buyer asks how the product handles accessibility, the answer describes a product that was designed for it.
Seattle's software market was shaped by Amazon and Microsoft, and by the cloud platforms they run. Many of the region's startups were founded by people who left one or the other, and they cluster in cloud infrastructure, developer tools, enterprise software and, increasingly, AI. Around them sit life sciences and global health organisations, retail and outdoor brands, and a long tail of companies whose entire estate lives in AWS or Azure. Buyers here have usually run services at scale themselves, and it shows in what they ask for.
The practical effect is more rigour and less explaining. A Seattle buyer expects a written design before code, with the alternatives considered and the reasons one was chosen. They count metrics, alarms and a runbook as part of done, not a later phase, and they want trade-offs stated plainly. Most already have a cloud agreement and committed spend on AWS or Azure, so the job is usually to make that estate tidier, cheaper and better understood. The other common pattern is the founder who left a large company and misses its internal platforms, because at a startup nobody has built them yet.
Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Seattle at around $149,000, and the large employers add stock on top, which is what a startup is really competing against. A senior search can run for months, and the work that waits is often the most concrete on the roadmap: a service split out of a monolith, a migration, a cloud clean-up, a model moved from a notebook into production. Each has a clear finish line, which makes it a good fit for a small team that writes the design first and the runbook as it goes.
We work from Bengaluru with four hours of live overlap every working day, placed across your morning in Seattle. Stand-ups and design reviews happen in that window, with the engineer who writes the code. Everything decided outside it goes into your repository, your tracker and the architecture notes we write as we go, so each day starts with a written record of what changed.
We fit best on work with a clear finish line: a new service, a migration, a cloud clean-up or a model moved into production. We add senior capacity within days while a req stays open, starting 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 Seattle teams.
How do you work with teams in Seattle?+
From Bengaluru, with four hours of live overlap every working day placed across your Seattle morning. Stand-ups and design reviews happen in that window, and you talk to the engineer who writes the code. We work in your Slack, your GitHub and your Linear. Designs are reviewed before code, and runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so the record lives where your team already works.
Do you work with teams already running on AWS or Azure?+
Yes, and in Seattle that is most teams. We work inside the estate you have: hand-built resources imported into Terraform, serverless functions made idempotent and traced end to end, cloud costs broken down per customer and feature, and AI features built on Bedrock or Azure OpenAI through the access your agreement already covers. The aim is an account that is tidier, cheaper and easier to explain, on the cloud you already pay for.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Seattle?+
Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Seattle at about $149,000, before stock, benefits and recruiting fees. Our published rate is $35 an hour, with a $5,000 minimum. There is no recruiting search and no employment overhead, and we can start within days. The usual first step is a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800, so you judge us on shipped work before committing to more.
What do the first two weeks look like?+
You share the context, and within two days you have a 30-minute call with the engineer who would do the work. Within a week you get a written plan: the options, the one we recommend and why, and how it rolls out. Then comes a fixed-price two-week piece, built in your repository from the first commit, with the design reviewed before code and the runbook written as it goes.
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.