Principal Frontend Engineer

Havoc is a leader in all-domain collaborative autonomy, specializing in software-defined hardware for autonomous systems across sea, air, and land. Their solutions enable real-time sensing, decision-making, and action in complex environments, optimizing mission performance while minimizing human risk. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, Havoc connects assets to share information, adapt dynamically, and maintain operations even under disrupted communications.

About the Role

HavocAI is seeking a Principal Frontend Engineer to architect, build, and scale the real-time interfaces operators use to command autonomous systems across air, surface, and subsurface domains.

Operators interact with autonomous vehicles through a real-time geospatial interface where live position, telemetry, and system state continuously flow into a common operational picture. Decisions made through this interface directly impact real-world vehicle operations.

This is a deeply technical individual contributor role for an engineer with 10+ years of experience building and scaling high-performance, real-time geospatial applications in production. You must understand the challenges of scaling entity counts, update frequencies, data volumes, and product complexity while ensuring responsiveness and reliability.

You will collaborate closely with the Head of Frontend and senior engineers to shape frontend architecture and technical direction while remaining hands-on with the most complex engineering challenges. This role involves significant influence through architecture, technical leadership, mentorship, and system quality, with no direct reports.

What You’ll Do

Frontend Architecture & Real-Time Systems

• Architect and build frontend systems capable of handling high-frequency, real-time data at scale.
• Establish production-ready patterns for data ingestion, transformation, state management, and rendering.
• Design transport-to-render architectures to prevent high-frequency telemetry from overwhelming the UI.
• Implement strategies for batching, throttling, caching, workers, and state isolation.
• Design predictable behavior for intermittent or degraded connectivity, including reconnection, state reconciliation, and offline tolerance.
• Identify architectural and performance risks early and drive solutions before they become production issues.

Geospatial Engineering

• Guide the architecture and evolution of HavocAI’s real-time geospatial interfaces.
• Design scalable approaches to map layers, feature identity, interaction state, rendering, and lifecycle management.
• Build performant experiences for large and continuously changing geospatial datasets.
• Optimize rendering as tracked entities, telemetry rates, and visual complexity increase.
• Contribute directly to complex geospatial capabilities and establish reusable patterns.

Performance & Scalability

• Profile and optimize browser performance across rendering, memory, CPU, network, and GPU workloads.
• Use measurement and profiling to guide architectural decisions rather than assumptions.
• Design client-side architectures that isolate high-frequency ingestion and processing from user-facing rendering workloads.
• Anticipate scaling challenges and sequence technical investments appropriately as the platform grows.
• Improve frontend reliability and performance without adding unnecessary complexity.

Technical Leadership

• Partner with the Head of Frontend and senior engineers on architecture, technical strategy, and major scaling decisions.
• Remain hands-on with implementation, particularly on the most complex or technically consequential parts of the frontend platform.
• Set a high bar for code quality, architecture, testing, maintainability, and performance.
• Lead design reviews and develop technical proposals that clearly communicate tradeoffs and recommended approaches.
• Mentor senior engineers in real-time systems, geospatial engineering, performance, and frontend architecture.
• Build alignment across teams through strong technical judgment and clear communication.

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years of frontend engineering experience, including significant experience at Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical scope.
• Deep production experience building and scaling high-volume, real-time applications.
• Expert-level experience with React and TypeScript, including a first-principles understanding of React’s rendering model and frontend performance.
• Deep experience building map-based geospatial applications using MapLibre, Mapbox GL, Deck.gl, or equivalent technologies.
• Demonstrated experience optimizing large and dynamic geospatial feature sets.
• Hands-on experience scaling a real-time application through significant growth in tracked entities, update frequency, or data volume.
• Experience with multiple real-time communication technologies such as WebSockets, MQTT, gRPC-web, SSE, or similar protocols.
• Deep browser performance expertise across rendering, memory, CPU, networking, and GPU bottlenecks.
• Experience designing client-side data architectures using workers, batching, caching, state boundaries, and other techniques for isolating high-frequency workloads.
• Experience designing applications for degraded or intermittent connectivity, including reconnection and state reconciliation.
• Strong software architecture and systems-design fundamentals.
• Demonstrated ability to make sound technical tradeoffs and sequence architectural changes within a production system.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence technical direction without relying on formal authority.
• High ownership and comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous engineering environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience taking an internal operational tool and evolving it into a scalable, multi-tenant product.
• Deep data visualization experience using D3, custom charting, or large-dataset visualization technologies.
• Experience with WebGL, Three.js, custom shaders, terrain visualization, or 3D geospatial applications.
• Experience with autonomous systems, robotics, command-and-control software, or real-time operational platforms.
• Experience in defense, aerospace, robotics, or other mission- or safety-critical environments.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, telemetry platforms, or backend architectures supporting high-frequency frontend applications.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first 12 months, you will have:

• Helped establish a frontend architecture capable of supporting significantly greater numbers of autonomous assets, telemetry streams, and real-time updates.
• Improved the performance, responsiveness, and reliability of HavocAI’s geospatial interfaces.
• Established scalable patterns for real-time data ingestion, state management, geospatial rendering, and degraded-connectivity scenarios.
• Identified and addressed architectural risks before they became constraints on product or platform growth.
• Raised the technical bar across the frontend organization through hands-on engineering, design reviews, architecture, and mentorship.