UX Engineer

Job board
Job board

The Open Molecular Software Foundation (OMSF) builds open-source infrastructure and tooling for computational molecular science. We’re looking for a UX Engineer who can ship polished, usable web experiences, especially where the UI is powered by interactive scientific visualization. We are offering a 6-8 month contract with an hourly rate determined based on the contractor’s experience and agreed upon project deliverables. We expect approximately 15-20 h per week for this project. The contractor will need to be based in the United States.

All work in this engagement will be released under the MIT License.

What you’ll work on

You’ll help us build a set of reusable visualization components for the software in our ecosystem, plus a few web interfaces that consume them.

Reusable components

The reusable components you’ll help build will manage the plumbing between our existing Python tooling and Javascript tools for visualization. The reusable components should be as framework-agnostic as possible, with the intent that they will be easy for other developers to incorporate into their own applications. Components we are considering include:

  • 3D protein-ligand complex visualization: Connect molecular representations from OMSF projects to a visualization tool such as Mol* or 3Dmol.
  • 3D small molecule visualization: Closely related to the protein-ligand visualization, but focused on interactivity with the small molecule in particular.
  • Task progress visualization: Connect our task progress backend to graph visualization libraries such as Cytoscape or vis.js network.
  • Alchemical network visualization: This combines a network visualization component (similar to the task progress) with the small molecule visualization component to illustrate how a tool like Open Free Energy transforms molecules as part of its scientific work.

Web interfaces

You’ll also work with our backend developers to put together simple web-based interfaces for small scale compute. These will act as a showcase of the reusable components, and you’ll also help us set up a good input interface. Web interfaces we’re considering include:

You might be a good fit if you…

  • Build modern web UIs comfortably in TypeScript that interface with backends written in Python
  • Have experience developing front-ends that interface with serverless cloud backends
  • Are comfortable collaborating on platforms such as GitHub
  • Like to write readable, easy-to-browse documentation for the tools you build
  • Can do pragmatic technical research: compare options, prototype, recommend, and then ship
  • Enjoy collaborating in the open: clear PRs, good commit messages, iterative review

Engagement Details

  • Contract basis: hours/week are flexible; although this particular contract has a hard stop after September 2026.
  • Fully remote: OMSF is a remote organization. Most work is asynchronous, with occasional synchronous check-ins at times friendly for continental US time zones.

How to Apply

Fill in this form. Be sure to include your resume, cover letter, and links to any examples of your work.