Who we are

At Cantera we're building the technology infrastructure to connect Latin American talent to the companies building the physical infrastructure that'll power North America's future.

We source, vet, and connect Latin American engineers and technical professionals with U.S. companies across data centers, energy generation and distribution, advanced manufacturing, and industrial construction, which all require on-site presence. We manage the full immigration and relocation process, and we've started with the TN visa for Mexican professionals.

The founding team came out of Stanford and Harvard. We're Latin Americans that have lived in the U.S. We closed an oversubscribed pre-seed round in early 2026, have successfully placed dozens of engineers at some of the largest construction companies in the U.S., and we're growing fast.

What you'll do

As a design engineer at Cantera, you'll design and build the surfaces our recruiters, candidates, and clients actually use. This includes AI interview workflows, candidate search and triage, how we present and discover candidates, and user interfaces for immigration processes.

You’ll work 75% in code and 25% in Figma. You'll go from sketch to deployed component and stay involved through the iteration cycle once users are on it. We're small enough that the same engineer often takes a feature end-to-end, so comfort wiring things up against the backend is a real plus.

You'll have ownership over a domain and the authority to make your own calls. You'll also pick up work outside that scope when it makes sense. We're a small, high-agency team. You’ll report to one of the co-founders.

Here's examples of work you might take on:

• Design and build the recruiter-facing tools our team uses daily: candidate search, triage, scheduling, and the workflows around them.

• Own our design system: components, tokens, and the patterns the rest of the team builds on top of.

• Use tools like Figma, Excalidraw or Figma Make to create sketches, prototypes, and visual artifacts for stakeholder alignment

• Take features from a Figma sketch to deployed code, and own the iteration cycle once users interact with the product.

• Build production-ready React components with exceptional attention to detail in layout, typography, and interaction

• Write clean, maintainable CSS and implement responsive designs that work across devices

• Partner with product engineers to design the surfaces that sit on top of the matching, search, and ranking systems they're building.

Who you are

We're building a high-agency engineering team of people who care about their craft. The codebase is mostly TypeScript and React. You should have strong opinions about layout, interaction, design patterns, and the engineering skills to make those opinions show up in production.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience as a front-end developer. Ideally you’ve worked in a product design role, or have taken up that responsibility in projects you’ve worked on.

• Comfort with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript

• Strong experience with React and modern frontend development practices

• Comfortable with component libraries like shadcn/ui and Radix, and the accessibility and semantic HTML patterns underneath them.

• Comfortable in Figma, both for original design work and for translating designs into code.

• You communicate clearly in English, in writing and in person. Slack, meetings, and PRs may run in English, so you should be comfortable working in that environment.

You'll be a great fit if:

• You’re excited by a role that gives you ownership across the design to implementation loop and you enjoy environments with fuzzy boundaries between roles.

• You think from first principles about UX instead of reaching for templated patterns.

• You get frustrated when designs are poorly implemented or engineering constraints aren't considered upfront

• You get energy from working in high-performance environments — you should expect that of us and we'll expect it of you.

• You take ownership and enjoy the responsibility that entails, because in an early-stage startup you'll be making foundational decisions continuously.

• You connect with the mission: enabling millions of talented people to access life-changing opportunities.

Location

• Based in Mexico City or willing to relocate there. This role is CDMX-based.

What we offer

• Base salary scales with experience. We pay towards the top of the Mexican market for engineers at your level

• Equity participation: you will be an early employee with meaningful upside

• Significant ownership over the design and frontend craft as Cantera grows

• A small, talented team that values design and craft

• An environment where you can use modern tools to supercharge your own work

• Direct access to and mentorship from the founding team