This job posting is now closed, but we've left it online for anyone who'd like to reference it. Thanks to all who applied!


We&#39;re the tiny team behind open-source projects like <a href="https://tailwindcss.com">Tailwind CSS</a>, commercial products like <a href="https://tailwindui.com">Tailwind UI</a>, and the book <a href="https://refactoringui.com/book">Refactoring UI</a>. We&#39;re hiring another programmer to help us build more awesome UI tools for developers.
<h2 id="about-the-job">About the job</h2>
We&#39;re looking for someone to work closely with <a href="https://twitter.com/adamwathan">Adam</a> (that&#39;s me, the guy who created Tailwind CSS!) to help shape and build the future of our tools and products.
You&#39;d spend your time developing and improving existing projects, for example:
<ul>
<li>Building new component and page examples <a href="https://twitter.com/steveschoger">Steve</a> designs for Tailwind UI</li>
<li>Implementing a componentization strategy for our Tailwind UI templates to extract repeated patterns and make our existing components easier to maintain and faster to develop</li>
<li>Building a system for exporting and synchronizing our Tailwind UI component markup with separate Git repositories that we give customers access to</li>
<li>Adding support for self-service upgrades to the Tailwind UI app</li>
</ul>
...as well as contributing directly at the product strategy and creative level to new projects, such as:
<ul>
<li>Designing and developing official React and Vue libraries using Tailwind UI components</li>
<li>Planning and developing a new Tailwind UI Ecommerce package</li>
<li>Building a live interactive demo application using Tailwind UI to help potential customers see what&#39;s possible</li>
<li>Adding support for multiple themes to Tailwind UI</li>
</ul>
We&#39;d also do a ton of open-source work together, like:
<ul>
<li>Working on new Tailwind CSS features like dark mode support or animation utilities</li>
<li>Designing and building a typography plugin for Tailwind that makes it easy to style Markdown content</li>
<li>Prototyping and evaluating the potential for a CSS-in-JS version of Tailwind</li>
</ul>
You and I would spend a lot of time pair programming, brainstorming on hard problems, prototyping different ideas, throwing them away, and prototyping them again. You wouldn&#39;t be just churning through tickets in a backlog — you&#39;d be helping to design entirely new products, figuring out what exactly we&#39;re even building and why.
We&#39;re only three people (you&#39;d be number four) which means that even though we each have our areas of expertise, we all wear many hats. We&#39;re looking for a programmer, but you&#39;d also help out with things like:
<ul>
<li>Managing GitHub issues and fixing bugs</li>
<li>Writing and improving the documentation for the tools we make</li>
<li>Answering customer support questions</li>
<li>Troubleshooting problems for users in places like Twitter and Discord</li>
</ul>
If you&#39;ve ever maintained an open-source project, working with us carries a lot of the same responsibilities. The difference is we all get paid for it and don&#39;t have to squeeze in all our work on evenings and weekends.
Here are a few recent projects you might have worked on if you were already part of the team:
<ul>
<li>Building the first batch of <a href="https://tailwindui.com/components/marketing/elements/headers">Marketing Header components</a> for Tailwind UI using Tailwind CSS, vanilla HTML, and a little bit of Alpine.js for the interactive demos</li>
<li>Building a <a href="https://gist.github.com/adamwathan/e0a791aa0419098a7ece70028b2e641e">Transition component in React</a> that lets Tailwind UI customers easily style enter/leave transitions with Tailwind utilities</li>
<li>Refactoring the actual Tailwind UI application (a Laravel app) to read component data from an isolated SQLite database instead of from the same database that holds customer information, to simplify and speed up deployments without any down-time</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="about-you">About you</h2>
We&#39;re looking for someone with very strong front-end skills who is an expert in a modern component framework like React or Vue, with experience in a back-end framework like Laravel being a big plus. More important than specific technical skills though is that you&#39;re a strong problem solver who loves to learn — we&#39;re not experts in everything and we don&#39;t expect you to be either.
You might not call yourself a designer, but you know great UI design when you see it and you know when something isn&#39;t up to par. Details matter to you, and if the text in a button is off-center by a pixel you will go to the end of the earth to figure out why.
We don&#39;t care if you went to school (I dropped out of both university and college!), we just care about what you can do and how you do it. We&#39;re all just makers and tinkerers, so as long as you love to build awesome stuff you&#39;ll fit right in.
Here are some of the technologies we work with day-to-day right now:
<ul>
<li>Tailwind CSS itself is written in modern JavaScript (and targets Node.js, not the browser), and tested with Jest</li>
<li>The Tailwind UI web application is a traditional server-rendered Laravel 7 application, enhanced with a little bit of <a href="https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine">Alpine.js</a></li>
<li>Tailwind UI components are authored in plain HTML + Alpine (but we&#39;d love your help migrating to a more maintainable approach)</li>
<li>The Tailwind documentation website is currently built with <a href="https://jigsaw.tighten.co/">Jigsaw</a> (a Laravel-based static site generator) and <a href="https://vuejs.org/">Vue.js</a>, but we are planning to rebuild it with <a href="https://nextjs.org/">Next.js</a> and <a href="https://github.com/mdx-js/mdx">MDX</a> in the coming months</li>
</ul>
One of the biggest projects we&#39;re going to be tackling later this year is developing official Tailwind UI React and Vue libraries, so long term we will be doing a lot more complex front-end JavaScript work than we do right now.
Some of the challenges that we expect to face on that project include:
<ul>
<li>Designing user-facing APIs for these libraries that are extremely flexible and powerful, but also easy to get started with</li>
<li>Coming up with an approach that supports multiple color palette options, while still being PurgeCSS-friendly</li>
<li>Building the interactive components (dropdowns, modals, etc.) with all accessibility best practices in mind, including correct use of ARIA attributes, proper keyboard navigation, and handling complex issues like focus trapping</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="pay-and-benefits">Pay and benefits</h2>
This is a fully remote, full-time (40 hour per week) position, and you can choose your own hours. All we ask is that you plan to overlap around ~4 hours per day with 8am-5pm EST because I am sick of always programming by myself.
The salary for this position is between $115,000 — $135,000 USD (or $160,000 – $195,000 CAD) based on experience, paid in your local currency. We&#39;ll do the currency conversion when you&#39;re hired and deal with any exchange fluctuation on our side.
The position includes 4 weeks (20 days) of paid time off, plus 10 additional days for local national holidays. You&#39;re also free to take additional time off here and there as needed for any reasonable reason, like of course if you are sick, but also if you need the morning off to take your pet to the vet, or need an afternoon off to drive a loved one to the airport, whatever. At the end of the day all that matters to us is that we&#39;re making progress on what we&#39;re building together — we&#39;re not interested in tracking time.
We are committed to working at a sustainable and healthy pace, and we believe 6-8 hours is more than enough time to get a solid day&#39;s work done.
We will buy you any equipment you need to do your best work, including a computer, external display, office chair — whatever you need. If you need to rent a desk at a co-working space, we&#39;ll pay for that as well.
We&#39;re a Canadian company, so the position is permanent/full-time in spirit but a contract role on paper since we can&#39;t actually hire anyone outside of Canada as a traditional employee. That means it does not include certain benefits like health insurance or a retirement plan, so we&#39;ve tried to account for that in the compensation.
<h2 id="how-to-apply">How to apply</h2>
To apply, write something specifically for this position that tells us why we&#39;re a great fit for each other, and what you see the future being like if we work together. Tell us what you&#39;re excited about in the industry these days, and what you&#39;re betting on for the future. Is there a project or feature you&#39;d love for us to build together? Tell us about that too!
We don&#39;t ask for your resume but that doesn&#39;t mean we&#39;re not interested in what you&#39;ve worked on in the past, we&#39;re just leaving it up to you to tell your own story the way you want to tell it.
We understand that not everyone has the same amount of time to dedicate to their application (I work from home with a two year old!), so don&#39;t feel like you need to spend 10 hours on it to stand out. As long as you sound like someone who could be a great fit when we&#39;re actually working together day-to-day with the same time constraints, we really want to meet you.
Give us a link to whatever you put together in the &quot;Your application&quot; field when applying.
We&#39;re accepting applications until May 27, 2020 at 10pm EST. There are no bonuses or penalties for submitting early or close to the deadline, so submit your application whenever works best for your own schedule. We&#39;re planning to start interviews early June, and aiming for a start date of mid July.
Can&#39;t wait to hear from you!

We&#39;re the tiny team behind open-source projects like <a href="https://tailwindcss.com">Tailwind CSS</a>, commercial products like <a href="https://tailwindui.com">Tailwind UI</a>, and the book <a href="https://refactoringui.com/book">Refactoring UI</a>. We&#39;re hiring a lead designer to help us design and develop new UI tools that empower people to build websites and applications that inspire them.
<h2 id="about-the-job">About the job</h2>
Even though we spend most of our time building tools, at our core we&#39;re a design company. We&#39;re looking to add another full-time designer to the team to help elevate our existing projects to the next level, and to shape and develop the future of our tools and products.
Here are a few recent projects you might have worked on if you were already part of the team:
<ul>
<li>Designing <a href="https://tailwindui.com/components/application-ui/page-examples/home-screens">application home screen examples</a> for Tailwind UI</li>
<li>Designing a <a href="https://tailwindui.com/checkout/4d5ccd7c-c0a3-4440-9f31-401a093dd7ba">new checkout experience</a> for Tailwind UI</li>
<li>Designing <a href="https://play.tailwindcss.com/">Tailwind Play</a>, our online sandbox tool</li>
<li>Redesigning the <a href="http://tailwindcss.com/">Tailwind CSS homepage</a> for v2.0</li>
<li>Coming up with a logo and visual identity for <a href="https://headlessui.dev/">Headless UI</a></li>
<li>Designing the official <a href="https://heroicons.com/">Heroicons website</a> and coming up with a user experience for rapidly finding and copying the icon you&#39;re looking for in both raw SVG and JSX</li>
<li>Producing a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u_vIdnJYLc">promotional trailer</a> for Tailwind CSS v2.0</li>
<li>Building the <a href="https://tailwindcss.com/docs/customizing-colors#color-palette-reference">new color palette</a> for Tailwind CSS v2.0, designing dozens of real-world example interfaces to test it out and ensure end-users would have success with it</li>
</ul>
...and here&#39;s a grab bag of things you might work on soon after you joined:
<ul>
<li>Spearheading a new e-commerce package for Tailwind UI by researching and cataloging common e-commerce UI patterns, mapping out component categories, and designing the new components and page examples</li>
<li>Designing a multi-user invitation/management feature for Tailwind UI team accounts</li>
<li>Designing an interface for selecting between multiple color palette options in Tailwind UI</li>
<li>Designing a proper documentation website for <a href="https://headlessui.dev">Headless UI</a></li>
<li>Designing example interfaces for our educational <a href="https://youtube.com/tailwindlabs">YouTube content</a></li>
<li>Illustrating new thumbnails for the Tailwind UI <a href="https://tailwindui.com/components">table of contents</a> to better match our updated Tailwind CSS v2.0 branding</li>
</ul>
You&#39;d also contribute directly to the strategy and creative phase of brand new ideas, for example designing and developing Tailwind CSS website themes and starter kits later this year. You&#39;d help us with some of the challenges we expect to face when developing these products, like:
<ul>
<li>Figuring out what the pain points are in existing theme products, and what we can do differently to make our themes a better experience</li>
<li>Deciding what the overall strategy for themes and starter kits should be — is it better to offer many hyper opinionated kits that target different project types, or a small set of kits that each have their own unique visual style but can be adapted to many types of projects?</li>
<li>Designing an approach to customization that feels intuitive and flexible without feeling like you have to learn some complex proprietary configuration system</li>
<li>Interviewing customers to find out what they are using our existing products for and inventing ways we can solve those problems even better that our customers haven&#39;t imagined</li>
</ul>
Even though we&#39;re fully remote, we&#39;re a very collaborative company and spend a lot of time working through problems in real-time using <a href="https://figma.com">Figma</a> as our virtual whiteboard, and fine-tuning designs in the browser over <a href="https://tuple.app">Tuple</a> until they&#39;re just right.
You&#39;d work directly with lots of different people on the team, including Steve if you&#39;re helping him iterate on a UI idea he can&#39;t quite crack, or someone on the engineering team like Adam to figure out a tricky responsive design issue.
<h2 id="about-you">About you</h2>
We&#39;re looking for someone with expert-level user interface and visual design skills who sweats the details and is obsessed with quality.
You might not identify as a front-end developer, but you understand the platform and have whipped together your share of little websites. Hopefully with Tailwind CSS!
You&#39;re a strong communicator, and you can get your ideas across clearly and persuasively in writing. We&#39;re a fully remote team, so async written communication is super important.
You&#39;re a quick learner who is energized by the challenge of trying something new. Producing a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u_vIdnJYLc">ridiculous trailer</a> for the first time in your life with software you&#39;ve never used before gets you excited, and you strive to achieve excellence even with unfamiliar problems.
In addition to UI design, you&#39;ve got other complementary skills that can really add a lot to a tiny team like ours. Maybe you&#39;re a fantastic illustrator, are great at 3D modelling, can create beautiful animations, produce amazing video content, or are an incredible teacher or marketer. We&#39;re only 6 people, so while we all have our specialties, we all make use of our hidden talents, too.
Most importantly, you just love to make stuff. You get excited about experimenting on a new idea, and love the feeling of putting it out into the world to see what people will do with it.
<h2 id="pay-and-benefits">Pay and benefits</h2>
This is a fully remote, full-time (40 hour per week) position, open to anyone with at least 4 hours of overlap with the Eastern Time Zone during a normal work day.
The salary for this position starts at $125,000 USD (or $160,000 CAD) for someone with excellent UI design skills and goes up to $175,000 USD (or $220,000 CAD) for someone who can really level up our team in a big way outside of a purely interface design role. The salary is paid in your local currency — we&#39;ll do the currency conversion when you&#39;re hired and deal with any exchange fluctuation on our side.
The position includes 4 weeks (20 days) of paid time off, plus 10 additional days for local national holidays. You&#39;re also free to take additional time off here and there as needed for any reasonable reason, like of course if you are sick, but also if you need the morning off to take your pet to the vet, or need an afternoon off to drive a loved one to the airport, whatever. At the end of the day all that matters to us is that we&#39;re making progress on what we&#39;re building together — we&#39;re not interested in tracking time.
We are committed to working at a sustainable and healthy pace, and we believe 6-8 hours is more than enough time to get a solid day&#39;s work done.
We will buy you any equipment you need to do your best work, including a computer, external display, office chair — whatever you need. If you need to rent a desk at a co-working space, we&#39;ll pay for that as well.
We&#39;re a Canadian company, so the position is permanent/full-time in spirit but a contract role on paper since we can&#39;t actually hire anyone outside of Canada as a traditional employee. That means it does not include certain benefits like health insurance or a retirement plan, so we&#39;ve tried to account for that in the compensation.
<h2 id="how-to-apply">How to apply</h2>
To apply, write something specifically for this position that tells us why we&#39;re a great fit for each other, and what you see the future being like if we work together. Please showcase 2–3 projects you&#39;ve worked on recently and tell us what you think we should know about them. If you&#39;ve got anything you designed, developed, and shipped entirely by yourself, we&#39;d really love to see it and hear the story.
We don&#39;t ask for your resume but that doesn&#39;t mean we&#39;re not interested in what you&#39;ve worked on in the past, we&#39;re just leaving it up to you to tell your own story the way you want to tell it.
We understand that not everyone has the same amount of time to dedicate to their application (I work from home with a two year old!), so don&#39;t feel like you need to spend 10 hours on it to stand out. As long as you sound like someone who could be a great fit when we&#39;re actually working together day-to-day with the same time constraints, we really want to meet you.
Give us a link to whatever you put together in the &quot;Your application&quot; field when applying.
We&#39;re accepting applications until January 28, 2021 at 10pm EST. We&#39;re planning to start interviews early February, and aiming for a start date of late March.
Can&#39;t wait to hear from you!

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