R-15 · CONTINUUM
LIVEFounding Canvas Engineer, Continuum
Ten thousand nodes, sixty frames a second, and legible in ten seconds to an executive who has never opened it. All three.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£210,000 to £360,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.50% to 1.10% of Continuum
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
Continuum's canvas has to do something most spatial tools do not attempt: stay rigorous enough that an engineer trusts the substrate, while remaining readable at a glance by somebody who only wants to know whether the launch is in trouble. Those two audiences pull the interface in opposite directions, and resolving that is the work.
Underneath it is a rendering problem with nowhere to hide. Panning, zooming, layout, hit-testing, selection and live collaborative cursors, at a node count where the DOM stopped being an option some time ago. You would own the renderer and the interaction model sitting on top of it.
More on the company itself: Continuum →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Your first week is spent with a profiler and the largest real customer graph we have, finding the frame budget and where it currently goes. Something measurable improves inside the fortnight, and you will have opinions about the layout algorithm by the end of it.
A normal Tuesday: rendering and interaction work in the morning, a conversation with the graph engineer about which mutations need to feel instantaneous, and an afternoon on legibility, which usually means removing visual information rather than adding it. Once a week somebody who has never used the product tries it in front of you.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
TypeScript, Canvas and WebGL where it is needed, and real attention to layout algorithms. React around the edges rather than through the middle. If you would rather write the renderer against WebGPU or in WASM and can defend it, that conversation is open.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
The renderer
Ten thousand nodes, interactive, without the DOM.
02
Layout
Automatic arrangement a human does not immediately want to undo.
03
Interaction
Pan, zoom, select, drag, and multiplayer cursors that do not fight each other.
04
Legibility
Ten seconds to read, for somebody who has never opened it before.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have built a high-performance interactive canvas, editor, map or visualisation, and can point at it
- ▸Real experience with Canvas, WebGL or an equivalent, and with profiling against a frame budget
- ▸Strong TypeScript
- ▸Visual judgement. This role is graded partly on how the thing looks and reads
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸Graph layout algorithms, and views on which of them are overrated
- ▸Collaborative or multiplayer editing
- ▸WebGPU, WASM, or having gone below the usual abstraction for performance
- ▸Design tooling, whiteboards, CAD or IDEs in a previous life
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. No degree is required for anything on this page, and we have hired people with doctorates and people with no degree at all into the same rooms. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£210,000 to £360,000 base, plus 0.50% to 1.10% of Continuum, reviewed upward annually without you having to ask. The band is published here rather than discovered three conversations in, and the offer is the same whether or not you negotiate, because the band is the band.
Everything else is what the whole group gets and is not negotiated per offer: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. We sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and publish exactly which.
06
Apply for this role
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.